News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Honduras's former president Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed in the US for drug trafficking. But the narco-state he ran was a product of US foreign policy and of the US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya's left-wing government. By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as "El Tigre" and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States. Bonilla had been a "highly trusted" torpedo loyal to the Hernández tribe. According to a Justice Department press release, the president and his brother had "El Tigre" shielding their drug shipments while also conducting "special assignments, including murder" of a rival trafficker. In heading the Honduran police, Bonilla also organized the return of death squads, tasked with "socially cleansing" Honduras of environmental activists, indigenous spokespersons, and investigative reporters. Hernández began his second term in 2017 atop a heap of killed and tear-gased protesters. [Honduras] was, according to Honduras scholar Dana Frank, "the first domino that the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America." After Honduras, a parliamentary coup took place against Paraguay's progressive president Fernando Lugo in 2012, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2015, and Brazil's current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a now-annulled prison sentence in 2017. Obama, hailed as the US president of "hope" and "change," oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements.
Note: Bonilla was trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Moore, Georgia (now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), which graduated more than 500 human rights abusers all over the world. For more along these lines, watch our latest Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
Many sweeping attempts to reform policing have faltered. But one proposal that has taken hold across the country, and continues to spread, is launching alternative first response units that send unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, to some emergencies. In Dayton, Ohio, trained mediators are dispatched to neighbor disputes and trespassing calls. In Los Angeles, outreach workers who have lived through homelessness, incarceration or addiction respond to 911 calls concerning people living on the street. In Anchorage, Alaska, trained clinicians and paramedics are showing up to mental health crises. Researchers have tracked over 100 alternative crisis response units operating across the U.S. Some distinguish between mobile crisis teams, which exclusively send clinicians to mental health emergencies, and community responder programs, which send civilians to a wider range of calls. The key tenets are that they can be the first response to an emergency situation and that they arrive without armed officers. There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job. Eventually, a large portion of current police work could be handed off to alternative responders. A 2020 review of 911 calls ... estimates that up to 68% of calls "could be handled without sending an armed officer," according to a report by the Center for American Progress and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on repairing criminal justice.
Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission ... to alert us to the harms that social media and modern parenting are doing to our children. His latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness ... writes of a "tidal wave" of increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too. He sees two factors that have caused this. The first is the decline of play-based childhood caused by overanxious parenting, which allows children fewer opportunities for unsupervised play and restricts their movement. The second factor is the ubiquity of smartphones and the social media apps that thrive upon them. The result is the "great rewiring of childhood" of his book's subtitle and an epidemic of mental illness and distress. You don't have to be a statistician to know that ... Instagram is toxic for some – perhaps many – teenage girls. Ever since Frances Haugen's revelations, we have known that Facebook itself knew that 13% of British teenage girls said that their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after starting on Instagram. And the company's own researchers found that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. These findings might not meet the exacting standards of the best scientific research, but they tell you what you need to know.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and mental health from reliable major media sources.
During his final three years at the US Food and Drug Administration the physician scientist Doran Fink's work focused on reviewing covid-19 vaccines. But a decade after joining the agency Fink had accepted a job with Moderna, the covid vaccine manufacturer. As he left for the private sector, the FDA's ethics programme staff emailed him guidelines on post-employment restrictions, "tailored to your situation." The email, obtained by The BMJ under a freedom of information request, explained that, although US law prohibits a variety of types of lobbying contact, "they do not prohibit the former employee from other activities, including working â€behind the scenes.'" The legal ability to work "behind the scenes" is enshrined in federal regulations and highlights a "critical, critical loophole" in US revolving door policy. Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the organisation Public Citizen, told The BMJ that the rules forbid various forms of direct lobbying contact but permit lobbying activity that is indirect. "So, people will leave government service and can immediately start doing influence peddling and lobbying," Holman explained. "They can even run a lobbying campaign, as long as they don't actually pick up the telephone and make the contact with their former officials." A majority of former FDA reviewers take up jobs in industry. Since 2000 every FDA commissioner, the agency's highest position, has gone on to work for industry.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.
Florida prosecutors heard graphic testimony about how the late millionaire and financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually assaulted teenage girls two years before they cut a plea deal, according to transcripts released Monday of the 2006 grand jury investigation. Epstein's ties to the rich and the powerful seems to have allowed him to continue to rape and sex traffic teenagers. Transcripts show that the grand jury heard testimony that Epstein, who was then in his 40s, had raped teenage girls as young as 14 at his Palm Beach mansion. The teenagers testified and told detectives they were also paid to find him more girls. After the grand jury investigation, Epstein cut a deal with South Florida federal prosecutors in 2008 that allowed him to escape more severe federal charges and instead plead guilty to state charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution. He was sentenced to one and a half years in the Palm Beach County jail system, followed by a year of house arrest. He was required to register as a sex offender. According to the transcripts, Palm Beach Police Det. Joe Recarey testified in July 2006 that the initial investigation began when a woman reported in March 2005 that her stepdaughter who was in high school at the time said she received $300 in exchange for "sexual activity with a man in Palm Beach," Recarey testified. Another teenager ... told detectives that she was 17 years old when she was approached by a friend who said she could make $200 by providing a massage at Epstein's home. Epstein told her that he would pay her if she brought other "girls" to his home. "And he told her, â€The younger, the better,'" Recarey said.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's child sex ring from reliable major media sources.
Danielle Stevenson ... has been pioneering a nature-based technique for restoring contaminated land, using fungi and native plants to break down toxins like petroleum, plastics, and pesticides into less toxic chemicals. The usual way of dealing with tainted soil is to dig it up and cart it off to distant landfills. In a recent pilot project funded by the city of Los Angeles, Stevenson ... working with a team of UC Riverside students and other volunteers, significantly reduced petrochemical pollutants and heavy metals at an abandoned railyard and other industrial sites in Los Angeles. Stevenson says she believes her bioremediation methods can be scaled up to clean polluted landscapes worldwide. "Decomposer fungi can degrade petrochemicals the same way they would break down a dead tree," [said Stevenson]. "And in doing so, they reduce the toxicity of these petrochemicals and create soil that no longer has these contaminants or has much reduced concentrations of it. They can also eat plastic and other things made out of oil. People who live in a place impacted by pollution need to have a say in how their neighborhood is being cleaned up. We need to empower them with the tools to do this. That's why along with doing these studies and pilot projects, I've been running workforce development programs. Potentially, they could bring economic opportunities and benefits to the community in addition to cleaning up the contaminated site."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing the Earth.
In A Band of Brothers, we believe that, when a man is willing to hold himself accountable and be supported by his community, magic can happen. And if you ask me what healthy masculinity looks like, it's that. A man who has been arrogant, ignorant, selfish, rageful ... in short, who has made mistakes (and show me a human who hasn't), having the courage to step into the circle and say: â€I need help'. And other men holding him accountable without ever closing their hearts to him. I have compassion for all the men I meet who are still so focused on their own wounds that they cannot lift their heads to see the wounds of others. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, which is the acute end of a much wider men's mental health crisis. The young men who come to us are often torn between competing pressures: an old story about needing to be tough, to make money, to dominate, and a newer one about needing to be gentle, to value more than money, to stop dominating, to renounce the old values. Compassion and accountability – you need both. And the compassion comes first. I am still struck by the words of the young man who said: "No-one had ever actually asked me why I was angry." He had also never been in a space where he was taught the difference between healthy anger, which is a natural and vital human emotion, and unhealthy anger, which leads to violence against yourself or others.
Note: This article was written by Conroy Harris, founder of A Band of Brothers. Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Michael Welu worked at the IRS for decades. During his time at the IRS, he says, upper management in the division tasked with auditing large corporations and ultrawealthy people – the Large Business and International Division – was quick to dismiss any suggestion that a powerful taxpayer may have committed a crime, and commonly discouraged frontline agents from pursuing big cases. This stood in deep contrast to the office that policed small businesses and self-employed people, which was empowered to ... take an appropriately firm stance toward taxpayers breaking the law. "I was putting butchers, bakers and candlestick makers in jail, but the big stuff we really wanted to go after was being ignored," Welu told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. "It could be the most egregious, ridiculous scheme and they were just not interested." Over the past five years, [the Large Business and International Division] flagged no more than 22 instances of possible tax crimes for the agency's criminal investigators to review further – out of trillions of dollars in annual income from large corporations and ultrawealthy people that the office oversees. During the same five years, the IRS office that covers small businesses and self-employed people flagged roughly 40 times more possible crimes, sending criminal investigators 848 referrals. The IRS says the amount of U.S. taxes left uncollected could exceed $600 billion per year.
Note: According to The Guardian, "Thirty-nine of the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid no federal income tax at all from 2018 to 2020 while reporting a combined $122bn in profits to their shareholders." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.
Bummer news for Gen X: A new study finds that the forgotten generation is being diagnosed with more cancer than their parents' and grandparents' generations. "Our results speak to the rate of incidence per 100,000 people," the researchers [said]. "Gen X is experiencing more cancer than their parents. They are outpacing both baby boomers and the Silent Generation." The researchers analyzed the number of newly diagnosed cancer cases among Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980), baby boomers (1946-1964), and the Silent Generation (1928-1945). The study ... was published Monday in JAMA Network Open. The researchers noted that public health initiatives have led to "substantial declines" in smoking. "However, other suspected carcinogenic exposures are increasing," the researchers reported. They said it seems likely that some of the growth is attributable to rising obesity rates and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. In their study of 3.8 million cancer patients, researchers found there have been declines in lung and cervical cancers among Gen X women, but also "significant increases" in thyroid, kidney, rectal, endometrial, colon, pancreatic and ovarian cancers, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leukemia. Among Gen X men, declines in non-Hodgkin lymphoma and lung, liver and gallbladder cancers have been offset by gains in thyroid, kidney, rectal, colon and prostate cancers and leukemia.
Note: This is a critically important issue that can bring people together across our polarized divides. Why is this not being thoroughly investigated? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.
Since the United States detonated its first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in 1945, dozens of accounts of UFOs have been logged by military witnesses and government scientists working with America's sensitive nuclear arsenal. Now a new, decades-long study has analyzed over 500 of the best supported UFO cases from the heights of the Cold War and hauntingly concluded: 'This intelligence understands atomics, and they understand atomic weaponry.' UFO reports over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift from sites where the bombs were made to missile silos and US air bases as the Cold War arms race grew. That's one of the key findings from the new work, a series of three studies led by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard's UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt. Their qualified, but haunting conclusion: Data from this three decade-long period lends credence to the idea that extraterrestrials, or some other intelligence, has methodically surveilled America's rise to a nuclear power. 'This intelligence understands the developmental cycle. They have some contextual knowledge of what they're looking at and what they're looking for,' Hancock [said]. Among the hundreds of cases included in their analysis was the infamous March 16, 1967 Malmstrom case in which Air Force witnesses reported that ten nuclear missiles were switched off by a UFO, confirmed by a US Strategic Air Command report.
Note: Read more about UFO interference with nuclear missiles. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
Covid vaccines could be partly to blame for the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic. Researchers from The Netherlands analysed data from 47 Western countries and discovered there had been more than three million excess deaths since 2020, with the trend continuing despite the rollout of vaccines and containment measures. Writing in the BMJ Public Health, the authors ... said: "Although Covid-19 vaccines were provided to guard civilians from suffering morbidity and mortality by the Covid-19 virus, suspected adverse events have been documented as well. "Both medical professionals and citizens have reported serious injuries and deaths following vaccination." The study found that across Europe, the US and Australia there had been more than one million excess deaths in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, but also 1.2 million in 2021 and 800,000 and 2022. Researchers said the figure included deaths from Covid-19, but also the "indirect effects of the health strategies to address the virus spread and infection". They warned that side effects linked to the Covid vaccine had included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting. German researchers have pointed out that the onset of excess mortality in early 2021 in the country coincided with the rollout of vaccines, which the team said "warranted further investigation".
Note: While mainstream narratives emphasize how rare these injuries are, the numbers speak for themselves. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a voluntary government reporting system that only captures a portion of the actual injuries. Vaccine adverse event numbers are made publicly available, and currently show 1,640,416 COVID vaccine injury reports, 37,647 COVID Vaccine Reported Deaths, and 216,757 COVID Vaccine Reported Hospitalizations. Explore our nuanced, uncensored investigation about this important issue.
A prominent lawyer representing leading UFO whistleblowers has made a startling revelation: the US government is set to unveil its alien secrets by October 18, 2024. Daniel Sheehan, a vocal advocate for disclosing the Pentagon's encounters with extraterrestrials, disclosed this information on the Freedom Pact podcast. Sheehan, who has been advocating for "disclosure" for several years, claims that a 64-page document signed by a bipartisan group of senators was condensed into a shorter bill containing a crucial deadline for disclosure. He claims the bill, passed into law on December 22, 2023, initiated a 300-day countdown. He [said], "The law has now mandated that all six of our United States military services, all 18 of our United States intelligence agencies, all 32 of our United States defense department agencies are all ordered to gather together every single piece of information they have acquired pertaining to the UFO phenomenon and non-human intelligence that is understood to be responsible for it. They are to gather that all together and have it available in a digitized and retrievable form by October 18 of 2024. The bill is said to include any UFO data over 25 years old that was previously classified. This would encompass some of the most renowned encounters, such as the Roswell Incident, the Phoenix Lights, and perhaps the most persuasive sighting, the lesser-known 1957 RB-47 encounter.
Note: We interviewed Daniel Sheehan to discuss the details of this unprecedented UFO disclosure process. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
After receiving more than $3.8 million in 2024 campaign donations from political action committees and individuals associated with the military industry, members of the House committee overseeing Pentagon spending just inserted two provisions into an upcoming bill that would exempt many more private products and services from competitive pricing guidelines and provide contractors far more leeway in what they can charge the Defense Department. Last year's Pentagon spending bill totaled nearly $884 billion. Over the past decade, more than half of that budget has gone to military contractors. Many of the top military contractors – including Boeing, RTX Corporation, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman – have seen sizable stock-value increases since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 while shooting down shareholder efforts at increased transparency. The provisions in the 2025 Pentagon spending bill are part of the 344-page National Defense Authorization Act of 2025 (NDAA). The provisions in question – Sections 811 and 812 – make good on a wishlist of policy changes that many military companies have been lobbying on for years. "As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I'm disappointed to see provisions in the NDAA that would allow contractors to further obscure pricing data," Rep. Ro Khanna [said]. "This would lead to more inflated costs and waste taxpayer money when we could be investing it instead."
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
UnHerd, the Britain-based publication I lead, published an investigation on April 17 into a transatlantic organization called the Global Disinformation Index. Having received money from the U.S. State Department, as well as the British, German and European Union governments, the GDI issues what amount to blacklists of news publications, on highly tendentious grounds, that online advertising exchanges then consult and can use to justify turning off ad revenue. What has emerged ... is an opaque network of private and government-supported enterprises that appear intent on censoring political views they find unpalatable. When the [GDI] was originally set up, in 2018, it defined disinformation as "deliberately false content, designed to deceive." On this basis, you could see the argument for having fact-checkers to identify the most egregious offenders. But mission creep has set in at the GDI. It has since come up with a definition of disinformation that encompasses anything that deploys an "adversarial narrative" – stories that might be factually true but pit people against one another by creating "a risk of harm to at-risk individuals, groups or institutions" – with institutions defined as including "the current scientific or medical consensus." The de facto alliance between government and groups working to defund disfavored publications – a sort of state censorship laundering arrangement – is particularly alarming. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act [bars] the Defense Department from placing military-recruitment advertising in publications utilizing GDI, NewsGuard or "any similar entity." The unaddressed problem with these disinformation referees is how their rulings affect online ad services themselves, not just advertisers, with the power to throttle revenue to publications simply for ideological reasons.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.
Project Gunrunner [was] a nationwide initiative launched in Laredo, Texas, in 2005, which sought to reduce the smuggling of firearms across the U.S. southern border. But while the primary tactic of Gunrunner was the interdiction of buyers and sellers who were violating the laws, [ATF] agents in Phoenix had other plans. They wanted to see where the guns went if they were allowed to cross the border – to follow the small fish until they caught bigger ones. Agents named their operation "Fast and Furious," after the popular movie about car racing. Between September 2009 and December 2010, a joint task force comprised of federal officials from ATF, FBI, DEA, and ICE, working under the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona, let over two thousand guns "walk" to Mexico. The murder that made the flawed operation public and political in the United States was of an American citizen on US soil: the killing of US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Though the investigators could not identify the specific gun that fired the bullet, two AK-47 style WASR-10 rifles were recovered at the scene. Both were traced to ... one of the straw purchasers the agents were monitoring under the Fast and Furious operation. ATF agents who shared their experiences during interviews conducted by a congressional committee admitted they knew that the only way they would learn the whereabouts of the guns they let go would be when Mexican law enforcement recovered them at crime scenes.
Note: Read more about the thousands of illegal guns American officials allowed into Mexico during Operation Fast and Furious. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
One ALS drug made $400 million in sales for its maker. It doesn't work. A cancer treatment brought in $500 million. That one turned out to have no effect on survival. A blood cancer medication made nearly $850 million before being withdrawn for two of its uses. That drug had been linked to patient deaths years prior. All of them were allowed to be sold to Americans because of the US Food and Drug Administration's drive to get new drugs to patients quickly – sometimes even before they're done testing. Drug companies are profiting, though. Since 2014, they've made at least $3.6 billion in global sales of medications that have either later been shown to be ineffective or had most or all of their uses withdrawn in the US. There are a number of ways a drug company can get its treatment to patients faster: There's the "priority review" pathway, then "fast track," "accelerated approval" and "breakthrough therapy." The majority of new drugs in the US are approved through one or more of these sped-up pathways. Last year two thirds of all new drugs reached the market this way. One of the problems is that sometimes drugmakers resist pulling a drug off the market, even after it's obvious it doesn't work. Makena, a drug to reduce the risk of premature birth, received a sped-up approval in 2011. Eight years later, a large trial found it didn't work. Yet it took another four years for the FDA to force it off the market. Makena ... generated over $1.6 billion in sales.
Note: The US spends the most on health care but has the worst health outcomes among high-income countries. More than half of children now have chronic health conditions. What is behind this? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of important news articles on Big Pharma corruption and health from reliable media sources.
A study of 140 overweight or obese adults enrolled in a weight loss program found that higher levels of self-compassion, particularly self-kindness, were linked to reduced negative feelings following a dietary lapse. Individuals who practiced self-kindness tended to feel less guilty and more positive about themselves despite the setback. Afterward, they reported feeling more in command of their eating habits, suggesting that self-compassion can help people regain a sense of agency after a lapse. The research from the Center for Weight, Eating and Lifestyle Sciences (WELL Center) at Drexel University, published in Appetite, found that when study participants had more self-compassionate responses to their lapse, they reported better mood and self-control over their eating and exercise behavior in the hours following the lapse. "Many people worry that self-compassion will cause complacency and lead them to settle for inadequacy, but this study is a great example of how self-compassion can help people be more successful in meeting their goals," said [lead author] Charlotte Hagerman, PhD. "The next time you feel the urge to criticize yourself for your eating behavior, instead try speaking to yourself with the kindness that you would speak to a friend or loved one." For example, instead of a person saying to his or herself, "You have no willpower," reframe it to a kinder – and truer – statement: "You're trying your best in a world that makes it very difficult to lose weight."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Ultra-processed foods are industrially formulated with added sugar, artificial sweeteners, additives and flavorings to be highly rewarding and even addictive. They can alter the brain's reward pathways the same way that other addictive substances do, making them challenging to consume in moderation. In fact, a body of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that some ultra-processed foods (UPFs) can be as addictive as cigarettes and cocaine. Several major food brands were once owned by the world's largest tobacco companies. Evidence suggests the same tactics used to formulate and market cigarettes were used in the creation of food products. Manufacturers of ultra-processed foods often seek to find ... "the bliss point," a term coined by American market researcher and food scientist Howard Moskowitz in the 1990s. The bliss point triggers dopamine – a neurotransmitter in the brain that is responsible for feelings of pleasure and well-being – to spike, then crash. This brings about good feelings, then bad feelings, and generates the craving to feel good once more. Food companies not only research taste, but also consumers' responses to color, smell, and "mouth feel" of products. "Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain." "Ultraprocessed foods … were consistently more associated with [the Yale Food Addiction Scale] indicators than were naturally occurring, minimally processed foods," according to the study ... Is Food Addictive, republished in 2021 in the Annual Review of Nutrition. About 57% of the calories American adults consume comes from UPFs. That percentage rises to 67% in American children. The food industry spends about $14 billion annually on advertising, with 80% of that devoted to highly processed foods.
Note: Eating junk food is more deadly than smoking and is linked to $50 billion in US health care costs due to how harmful it is on our bodies. Meanwhile, the NIH invests very little funding into nutrition studies and students in medical schools spend less than 1 percent of their education learning about diet. Read our latest Substack article on how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporate cartels fueling America's health crisis.
The Environmental Protection Agency must ban the toxic weedkiller paraquat – a step more than 60 other countries have taken because of its threats to human health. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson's disease, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, childhood leukemia and more. While the EPA says paraquat is too toxic for use on U.S. golf courses, it still allows use of the herbicide on farms. This threatens the health of the people who apply it, other farmworkers and those who live or work near crop fields where it's used. More than 10 million pounds of paraquat were sprayed in 2018 alone, twice as much as has been sprayed since 2014. While much of the paraquat applied winds up in the soil for years, the chemical can also drift through the air or linger in dust. Syngenta makes paraquat in China and the United Kingdom. The Swiss-based company, which was acquired by a Chinese state-owned chemical conglomerate, has long understood the chemical's health risks. But it spent decades hiding this knowledge from the public and the EPA. Ironically, Chinese, U.K. and Swiss farmers are prohibited by their respective governments from using paraquat due to potential health risks from exposure. But the weedkiller isn't prohibited in the U.S. Ingesting even tiny amounts of paraquat can be lethal. Recently, findings from researchers at UCLA show paraquat sprayed within 500 meters ... of where people lived and worked could more than double a person's odds of developing Parkinson's.
Note: Read more about the dangers of paraquat. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.
Laura Talmus felt helpless when her then-11-year-old daughter Lili kept calling her from school in tears. After her daughter passed away from medical complications in her sleep at age 15 in 2009, Talmus put together a video celebrating her life. When she showed the video, Lili's classmates were shocked to realize how isolated Lili had felt. The next year, Talmus ... and her husband channeled their grief into forming Beyond Differences, a nonprofit that focuses on raising awareness about social isolation in youth and providing solutions. Talmus believes the social isolation her daughter experienced is affecting students all over the country and contributing to serious health issues, mental health problems, suicide and school violence. Beyond Differences ... has now grown to reach over one million students in all 50 states. On February 16, 2,500 schools [participated] in No One Eats Alone Day, a day of action ... that encourages fifth through eighth graders to mingle, make new friends and become more aware and proactive about social isolation, especially at lunch. "No One Eats Alone is completely rooted in the experience Lili had," Talmus explains. "For many children, the lunch break or recess are the worst parts, so we started with that." Beyond Differences sends backpacks or "Belonging Boxes" with a lesson plan, games, toys, art projects, stickers and conversation starters to participating educators, at no cost to the schools.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.