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Revealing News For a Better World

News Articles
Excerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media


Below are key excerpts of little-known, yet highly revealing news articles from the media. Links are provided to the full news articles for verification. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These articles are listed by order of importance. You can also explore these articles listed by order of the date of the news article or by the date posted. By choosing to educate ourselves, we can build a brighter future.

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.


Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden's social-media censorship
2024-10-13, MSN News
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/universities-shred-their-ethics-to-...

Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends – but in truth, to help censor the Internet. Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters. A lawsuit against the Biden administration in the case that became Murthy v. Missouri uncovered emails in which federal officials threatened to penalize social-media companies unless they complied with orders to banish users who posted speech contrary to the administration's priorities. Last year, a federal judge reviewing this evidence dubbed the administration's effort a de facto "Ministry of Truth." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" his social-media empire to censor speech – even humor and satire. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and revealed similar evidence in the "Twitter Files," the public first learned that university misinformation research teams, funded by the government, actively participated in those censorship efforts. These academics served as a front for the government's censorship policy, essentially laundering it in the name of science. But if this is research, it is unethical research that harms the human subjects under study.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and government corruption.


The cult of Covid censorship is finally being broken
2024-10-11, The Telegraph (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/10/11/the-cult-of-covid-censorshi...

Stanford University hosted the first major university-sponsored conference where different viewpoints on the appropriate management of pandemics were aired and debated. For much of 2020-2022, critical debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of mandatory Covid policies ... was treated with deep hesitation at best and outright hostility at worst. Professors and students who publicly questioned the mainstream consensus were censored on social media, vilified by their colleagues, and, in the case of Covid vaccine mandates, fired by administrators. Universities failed in their mission to promote academic debate and freedom during the most significant domestic policy issue of this century. During these years, colleagues and students with critical, sceptical viewpoints and countless members of the public [asked] why institutions of higher education were not hosting reasoned debate. The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson for those interested to hear. We need more freedom of expression and academic debate during crises and emergencies, not less. Many are tired of the vapid arguments of ideologues and hungry for a return to the ... academic tradition of debate. By that standard, the Stanford Covid conference was a huge success. The panels addressed key issues regarding the evidence for Covid lockdowns, the management of information and censorship, the impact of lockdowns on the world's poor, and the contentious question of the origin of the virus. Experts who supported early school closures reasoned together with those who did not. Those who support the lab leak hypothesis argued their case with those who disagree. And they disagreed about the wisdom of social media censorship in a pandemic. In the end, the conference achieved its stated purpose: to bring serious thinkers and scientists into constructive dialogue with one another.

Note: Learn more about the Stanford conference that inspired this article. An article by The Nation about this Stanford conference is a significant example of how dissenting views get spun into divisive partisan rhetoric, contributing to the larger culture wars poisoning public discourse.


‘Like a sylvan spa!' Inside Zurich's staggering, revolutionary new hospital for kids
2024-10-09, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/oct/09/zurich-hospital-kindersp...

"Hospitals are the ugliest places in the world," says Jacques Herzog. "They are a product of blind functionalist thinking, while neglecting basic human needs." Welcome to Zurich's remarkable new children's hospital, the Kinderspital – or "Kispi" for short – a 14-year endeavour to revolutionise how we think about the architecture of healing. It is not trying to be a fancy hotel, like some private hospitals. It is just a place where simple things like the quality of light and views, the scale and proportion of spaces and the texture of materials have been thought about with immense care, and honed to make the experience as pleasant as possible for everyone. The firm [Herzog & de Meuron] completed an impressive, yet oddly undersung, rehabilitation clinic in Basel in 2002, and is now building a huge amoeba-shaped hospital in Denmark as well as a terracotta-clad ziggurat teaching hospital in San Fransisco. "I am totally convinced that architecture can contribute to the healing process," [Herzog says]. The 600-strong practice has been quietly tackling the topic of healthcare for the last two decades. Kispi ... is unlike any other hospital. The rooms have a more domestic feel than typical hospital rooms, like being in the attic of an alpine chalet. They have big picture windows and clever window seats that can be pulled out to become beds, giving weary parents a place to sleep. Having a sloped wooden roof and natural light makes a huge psychological difference when you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling all day. Fun porthole windows at child height can be opened for natural ventilation, while every room has an en suite bathroom. Wooden floors add a sense of warmth in contrast to the usual stark vinyl – and they're just as hygienic, coated with ultra-hardwearing polyurethane. "We've tried to make the architecture address the curiosity of children," says Christine Binswanger, partner in charge of the project.

Note: Don't miss the incredible photos of this children's hospital at the link above. Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies.


Pentagon's secret UFO data retrieval program 'Immaculate Constellation' revealed for first time in new whistleblower report
2024-10-09, Daily Mail (One of the UK's Popular Newspapers)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13942241/Pentagon-secret-UFO-...

A secretive Pentagon UFO data retrieval program has been hidden from Congressional oversight since 2017, a new report claims. Whistleblowers assert the program – codenamed 'Immaculate Constellation' – was established to 'detect' and 'quarantine' the military's best UFO imagery, as well as its best videos, eyewitness testimonies and electronic sensor evidence. This trove of high quality, multi-sensor UFO data is so tightly held that 'talking about it will put you in the danger zone,' according to a US official who confirmed the leak. The quite literally 'above top secret' program allegedly sprang into action in the wake of the 2017 leak of three, still-as-yet unexplained US Navy infrared UFO videos. The source of the leaked report, who supplied the document to the independent news site Public, described the program as an 'Unacknowledged Special Access Program' or USAP with unique secrecy privileges. 'The multitude of wavelengths collected by these sensors ... have captured UAP characteristics that are difficult or impossible to observe with the human eye alone,' according to the leaked report, allegedly intended for cleared members of Congress. 'Subtle atmospheric effects associated with UAPs are also visible through the sensors,' the leaked report added. 'Some of the phenomena we may be seeing,' ex-CIA head John Brennan [said], 'results from something that we don't yet understand and ... some might say constitutes a different form of life.'

Note: Watch a fascinating NewsNation interview about this secret Pentagon UAP program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the resources provided in our UFO Information Center.


School lunch tests reveal dozens of pesticides on single items, heavy metals, other toxins
2024-09-26, ABC News
https://wjla.com/features/i-team/school-lunch-tests-meals-reveal-pesticides-h...

In America's schools, 30 million lunches are served every day. There are standards in place for things like calories, sodium, and added sugar. The USDA asserts that lunches consumed from schools are the most nutritious. We sent school lunches to the Health Research Institute, an accredited lab in Iowa, to hunt for what standards don't cover: heavy metals, pesticides, and veterinary drugs. Our tests revealed unseen, largely unregulated components increasingly connected to everything from attention deficit disorder and liver disease to hormone disruption and cancer. Samples we collected from schools in Washington DC, Virginia, and Maryland included common fare like breadsticks, pizza, potatoes, and fruit. The lab identified more than 50 pesticides in our samples, with dozens often layered into one meal. 38 different pesticides were detected in just one elementary school lunch. 23 pesticides were found in a single strawberry cup. The fungicide, carbendazim, which is banned in most European countries, Brazil and Australia because it is increasingly connected to cancer, infertility, and birth defects, was found in five of our twelve samples. Glyphosate, a widely used and controversial weed killer ... connected to cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, was detected in multiple samples, often in wheat-based products like bread. Cadmium, a known carcinogen, was detected in our samples at a level 12 times higher than the FDA's limit for bottled water.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.


It Was Supposed to Be a Sting Operation. Did ICE Traffic Drugs Instead?
2024-09-25, Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/operation-mayan-jaguar-...

On Sept. 24, 2007, a red, white, and blue Gulfstream II fell from the sky over the Yucatán Peninsula. From the wreckage, [Mexican commandos] removed 132 industrial trash bags, weighing around 4 tons. The bags were filled with cocaine. The Gulfstream ... had flown for the CIA's rendition program. When it went down, it belonged to a newly-formed company near Boca Raton, Florida, called Donna Blue Aircraft ... an "undercover company" of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Rolling Stone investigation into thousands of pages of government documents, flight logs, court filings, and local news reports ... confirmed there was a secret ICE operation called Mayan Jaguar. According to classified reports, ICE bought private planes from 2004 to 2007, intending to tag them with hidden tracking beacons and, through front companies like Donna Blue, sell them to drug traffickers. ICE agents would draw "approximately 20 planes" into Operation Mayan Jaguar. ICE stopped none of them, while other governments thwarted some, without ICE. The Drug Enforcement Administration, convinced that traffickers controlled Mayan Jaguar, ordered ICE to shut it down. "ICE Headquarters advised the agents … to continue working," according to another agent's IG testimony. Operation Mayan Jaguar would be "a coordinated interagency task force developed by the intelligence community," according to an internal ICE memo. The narcotics trade was largely legal until global prohibition began in the early 20th century. Waves of drug planes and state-sponsored trafficking weren't far behind. From the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA proprietary airlines flew arms into the Golden Triangle for anti-communist guerillas, and were suspected of flying out with the guerillas' opium. It was allegedly the same deal in the Eighties, but in Central America, with cocaine. In Asia, the CIA paid Afghan heroin lords to fight the Soviets, and later to fight the Taliban. In 1998, the CIA's marquee aviation front, Southern Air Transport, declared bankruptcy a week before the CIA's inspector general implicated the company in cocaine trafficking.

Note: Our investigative Substack article explores the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores. For more, watch our Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the war on drugs. Check out our database of concise and revealing news summaries on the war on drugs from reliable media sources.


Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was ‘Not Particularly Dangerous.'
2024-09-14, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/us/nixon-marijuana-tapes.html

Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation's "public enemy No. 1," he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office. Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was "not particularly dangerous." Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an "all-out offensive," also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. The remarks were captured on the president's secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government's drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proven medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to rigorously study the therapeutic potential of cannabis. Experts on the Nixon years said that they were previously unaware of the recordings of Nixon speaking about marijuana and that the remarks were significant in light of the policies he had championed, which remain the backbone of today's drug laws.

Note: Our investigative Substack article explores the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores. For more, watch our Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the war on drugs. Check out our database of concise and revealing news summaries on the war on drugs from reliable media sources.


Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?
2024-09-14, Yahoo! News
https://www.yahoo.com/news/blame-fauci-covid-pandemic-100053993.html

For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, [Anthony] Fauci had served as the ... director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous. In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs. In October 2014, President Barack Obama's administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research that could make ... viruses transmissible via the respiratory route in mammals. In 2017, the White House produced the ... P3CO framework. Under P3CO, the NIH would forward grant proposals involving research on known pandemic pathogens or research that might create or enhance such pathogens to a new P3CO committee within HHS for a department-level risk-benefit analysis. To date, the P3CO committee has vetted just three research proposals involving so-called enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, out of potentially dozens that should have been examined. Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins ... found a way to skirt the oversight process. They "realized that if they don't [forward proposals to HHS for review], there is no review." In 2014, [EcoHealth Alliance] received a five-year, $3.7 million NIAID grant to collect virus samples from human beings and bats in China and then experiment on these viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth announced that it intended to create "chimeric" or hybrid viruses out of spike proteins, the part of a virus that allows it to enter and infect hosts cells, from SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in the wild and the backbone of another, already-known SARS virus. When EcoHealth's year five report was eventually submitted two years late, in 2021, it showed that additional chimeric viruses created in Wuhan demonstrated both enhanced transmission and lethality in humanized mice. By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was already well underway.

Note: Watch our latest Mindful News Brief series on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID-19 and government corruption from reliable major media sources.


The War Crimes That the Military Buried
2024-09-10, New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-war-crimes-that-the-militar...

The reporting team of the In the Dark podcast has assembled the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11–nearly eight hundred incidents in all. Much of the time, the reporting concluded, the military delivers neither transparency nor justice. The database makes it possible, for the first time, to see hundreds of allegations of war crimes–the kinds that stain a nation–in one place, along with the findings of investigations and the results of prosecutions. We limited our search to ... allegations of violence perpetrated by U.S. service members or deaths in U.S. custody that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. Of the seven hundred and eighty-one cases we found, at least sixty-five per cent had been dismissed by investigators who didn't believe that a crime had even taken place. In a hundred and fifty-one cases, however, investigators did find probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn't been justified. These include the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim's ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility. Yet, even in these cases, meaningful accountability was rare.

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.


‘It's tough when you see a small child who's wounded': How Bikers Against Child Abuse are making a difference
2024-09-08, Chek News
https://cheknews.ca/its-tough-when-you-see-a-small-child-whos-wounded-how-bik...

Revving their engines, the Bikers Against Child Abuse love to ride, and they love to make a difference by helping children who have been abused. It is about giving them back some of the power balance that has been stolen from them, giving them back some of the childhood that has been stolen from them," says Bikers Against Child Abuse‘s Tom Goudreau, whose road name is ‘Motown'. The Bikers Bikers Against Child Abuse – BACA for short – has chapters all over North America and around the world. Children they help are welcomed in a special ceremony and they can reach out for help whenever they need it. "They get a road name like we have, and two primaries who will be responsible, 24/7, for that child whenever they need it," Motown says. "We'll be there at three o'clock in the morning, if necessary." It's something Motown wishes he had had as a child after being abused by a family member. "A lot of us are survivors," he says. "The number one thing that people say to us around the world is, I wish you were there when I was a kid. That's usually with a tear in their eye. Child abuse is epidemic. We need to face the facts. This happens everywhere. That's why we're in 19 countries around the world because child abuse is everywhere." "It's tough when you see a small child who's wounded, needs help, but when you see them, change from that small child to somebody who's empowered, it's the best feeling in the world," [a member] adds.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.


Mark Zuckerberg Blames Biden for 'Government Pressure' To Censor Facebook
2024-08-27, Reason
https://reason.com/2024/08/27/mark-zuckerberg-blames-biden-for-government-pre...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that his company's moderators faced significant pressure from the federal government to censor content on Facebook and Instagram–and that he regretted caving to it. In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), the committee's chairman, Zuckerberg explained that the pressure also applied to "humor and satire" and that in the future, Meta would not blindly obey the bureaucrats. The letter refers specifically to the widespread suppression of contrarian viewpoints relating to COVID-19. Email exchanges between Facebook moderators and CDC officials reveal that the government took a heavy hand in suppressing content. Health officials did not merely vet posts for accuracy but also made pseudo-scientific determinations about whether certain opinions could cause social "harm" by undermining the effort to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated. But COVID-19 content was not the only kind of speech the government went after. Zuckerberg also explains that the FBI warned him about Russian attempts to sow chaos on social media by releasing a fake story about the Biden family just before the 2020 election. This warning motivated Facebook to take action against the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story when it was published in October 2020. In his letter, Zuckerberg states that this was a mistake and that moving forward, Facebook will never again demote stories pending approval from fact-checkers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable major media sources.


The staggering death toll of scientific lies
2024-08-26, Vox
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-research-fraud-crime-jai...

[Don] Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s. One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans's research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly. The problem? Poldermans's data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he "used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and ... submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data." Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized. After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before non-cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27 percent more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their surgery. Millions of surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place. One provocative analysis ... estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in science and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.


‘Empowering and healing, people's assemblies are the future of democracy'
2024-08-21, Positive News
https://www.positive.news/opinion/galvanising-communities-to-confront-the-cri...

A wave of local democracy is sweeping across Europe. On the streets of Hull ... democracy is coming to life through people's assemblies. Assemblies are public meetings where local people get together to discuss and decide on a specific issue, without political interference or hidden agendas. These assemblies can help us fundamentally rethink how we make decisions in our society, and create strong, active communities in the process. To survive ecological breakdown and the collapse of our failing economy, we need both, urgently. The culture war has gained a lot of ground. Overcoming these divisions is one of our biggest, most pressing challenges. Through assemblies, it's possible to form self-organising communities where we lift each other out of the conditions that these ideologies prey on. Where we are forced to work alongside people we disagree with or even dislike, and organise positive initiatives that feed us, lower our energy bills, give us purpose and contribute to a stronger community spirit. Our assembly ground rules ask us to look for what we have in common, and there is a wealth of agreement to be found if you care to look for it. Cooperation Hull is holding Neighbourhood Assemblies across the city, and in each one we are learning what happens when a room full of strangers upend social norms to break bread, hold hands (an ice-breaker) and voice their honest opinions on the most important questions of our time. Soon we will launch the first citywide assembly: hundreds of people weighing in on a big issue, then attempting to make practical changes with the help of local organisations – and there are groups like us popping up from Cornwall to Glasgow, and Italy and Germany, too. The potential of assemblies is nothing short of revolutionary. It is the potential to change everything.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.


A Memoir Offers an Insider's Perspective Into the Pentagon's U.F.O. Hunt
2024-08-16, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/books/booksupdate/imminent-luiz-elizondo.html

Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published ... after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon. In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, wrote that, without Elizondo, "the U.S. government would still be denying the existence of U.A.P. and failing to investigate a phenomenon that may well be the greatest discovery in human history." The program led by Elizondo investigated sightings, near-misses and other encounters between U.A.P. and Navy jets. It also collected data from incidents involving military and intelligence operations, including images of extraordinary craft maneuvers.

Note: 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.


Vulnerable and Voiceless–The Ongoing Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Migrant Children
2024-08-13, Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com/vulnerable-voiceless-ongoing-failure-protect-unaccom...

In 2015, my career with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency led me to step forward as a whistleblower, exposing a grave issue–the placement of unaccompanied migrant children with inadequately vetted sponsors. Since 2012, Homeland Security officials have released over 730,000 children they encountered to Health and Human Services (HHS) for placement with sponsors. This year alone, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, nearly 95,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been encountered at the border. Each of these numbers represents a vulnerable life. The crux of the issue lies in our inadequate vetting processes for sponsors. Despite my whistleblowing efforts in 2015 that briefly led to policy changes, we've regressed. Children continue to be placed with potentially dangerous sponsors, exposing them to risks of trafficking, abuse, and neglect. This is not a partisan issue; it's a moral imperative that transcends political affiliations. Despite the gravity of this crisis, it's important to note that Congress is not meaningfully acting on the problem. Senator Chuck Grassley ... revealed that the HHS had placed children with sponsors connected to MS-13, a notorious international criminal gang, and even with individuals suspected of involvement in human trafficking rings. The trafficking of minors across our borders has become a dark and lucrative business, and our failure to adequately safeguard these children makes us complicit.

Note: This article was written by former U.S. Army Captain Jason Piccolo. Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on immigration corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.


From source to stomach: How blockchain tracks food across the supply chain and saves lives
2024-08-12, World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/08/blockchain-food-supply-chain/

Efficiently run food supply chains can positively impact communities and lives across the globe. Real-time tracking supports sustainability, prevents food waste, and ensures compliance with environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. Communication throughout the supply chain can help producers earn fair compensation for their efforts. Traditional approach to food supply chain management face challenges to efficiency, security and transparency. The consequences can be dire, from food waste to death by contamination. Blockchain technology can provide much-needed transparency, traceability and privacy, as well as co-ordination across disparate parties, enabling greater food access and quality improvements across the global supply chain. Built on a blockchain backend, Silal Fresh adopted a comprehensive traceability solution that utilizes consumer apps, a web-based dashboard, and integration with existing supply chain management systems. This significantly improved identifying and flagging delays in their deliveries, as well as increased satisfaction, trust and brand loyalty. They even added tracking to each piece of produce so that a consumer could pick up a vegetable, scan a QR code, and see that food item's journey. Ultimately, increased transparency and traceability can save lives. With improved traceability, food recalls can happen faster, and the source of contamination can be determined quicker.

Note: Our latest video explores the potential for blockchain to transform society for the better. Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.


‘Every building sits on a thermal asset': how networked geothermal power could change cities
2024-08-09, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/09/every-building-si...

There is a massive battery right under your feet. Unlike a flammable lithium ion battery, though, this one is perfectly stable, free to use, and ripe for sustainable exploitation: the Earth itself. While temperatures above ground fluctuate throughout the year, the ground stays a stable temperature, meaning that it is humming with geothermal energy. "Every building sits on a thermal asset," said Cameron Best, director of business development at Brightcore Energy in New York, which deploys geothermal systems. "I really don't think there's any more efficient or better way to heat and cool our homes." A couple of months ago Eversource Energy commissioned the US's first networked geothermal neighbourhood operated by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. Pipes run down boreholes 600-700ft (about 180-215 metres) deep, where the temperature of the rock is consistently 55F (13C). A mixture of water and propylene glycol ... pumps through the piping, absorbing that geothermal energy. Heat pumps use the liquid to either heat or cool a space. If deployed across the country, these geothermal systems could go a long way in helping decarbonise buildings, which are responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Once a system is in place, buildings can draw heat from water pumped from below their foundations, instead of burning natural gas. The networks ... can be set up almost anywhere.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.


Google's wrong answer to the threat of AI – stop indexing content
2024-07-20, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/20/googles-wrong-a...

Once upon a time ... Google was truly great. A couple of lads at Stanford University in California had the idea to build a search engine that would crawl the world wide web, create an index of all the sites on it and rank them by the number of inbound links each had from other sites. The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk ... disrupts search behaviour. Google's mission – "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible" – looks like a much more formidable task in a world in which AI can generate infinite amounts of humanlike content. Vincent Schmalbach, a respected search engine optimisation (SEO) expert, thinks that Google has decided that it can no longer aspire to index all the world's information. That mission has been abandoned. "Google is no longer trying to index the entire web," writes Schmalbach. "In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine." The default setting from now on will be not to index content unless it is genuinely unique, authoritative and has "brand recognition". "They might index content they perceive as truly unique," says Schmalbach. "But if you write about a topic that Google considers even remotely addressed elsewhere, they likely won't index it. This can happen even if you're a well-respected writer with a substantial readership."

Note: WantToKnow.info and other independent media websites are disappearing from Google search results because of this. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and censorship from reliable sources.


Social prescribing looks beyond medicine to non-clinical methods of treatment
2024-07-18, Broadview
https://broadview.org/social-prescribing-looks-beyond-medicine-to-non-clinica...

Dr. Kate Mulligan is the Senior Director of the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing (CISP), a new national hub created to support health care providers and social services professionals to connect people to non-clinical supports and community resources. Mulligan ... led one of Canada's first social prescribing projects. "They have a conversation with someone with expertise [like a doctor] to determine a plan, and get support to follow through on something non-clinical that benefits their health. It should be happening systematically, as a regular part of our health system," [said Mulligan]. Someone experiencing food insecurity or an illness like diabetes can be prescribed fresh foods. That could mean a voucher for your local farmers' market, a food box delivery to your home or a credit card that you can spend at the regular grocery store. Social prescribing also means making sure the provided food is culturally appropriate ... thinking about possible connections to include and benefit local farmers. A small community largely inhabited by retirees – lots of people ending up living alone without a strong support network – implemented social prescribing. An older man was diagnosed with depression after his wife died. He kept going for primary care, but really what he was experiencing was unsupported grief. Through social prescribing, he was connected with a fishing rod and a fishing buddy. This is like a $20 intervention. Within a fairly short time, he got off his medication and reconnected with other services too – built friendships, got connected to other community offerings. The health centre started developing their own services, like grief support cooking classes for older grieving widows.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our bodies and healing social division.


AI's ‘Oppenheimer moment': autonomous weapons enter the battlefield
2024-07-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/14/ais-oppenheimer-mo...

The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza. Growing conflicts around the world have acted as both accelerant and testing ground for AI warfare while making it even more evident how unregulated the nascent field is. The result is a multibillion-dollar AI arms race that is drawing in Silicon Valley giants and states around the world. Altogether, the US military has more than 800 active AI-related projects and requested $1.8bn worth of funding for AI in the 2024 budget alone. Many of these companies and technologies are able to operate with extremely little transparency and accountability. Defense contractors are generally protected from liability when their products accidentally do not work as intended, even when the results are deadly. The Pentagon plans to spend $1bn by 2025 on its Replicator Initiative, which aims to develop swarms of unmanned combat drones that will use artificial intelligence to seek out threats. The air force wants to allocate around $6bn over the next five years to research and development of unmanned collaborative combat aircraft, seeking to build a fleet of 1,000 AI-enabled fighter jets that can fly autonomously. The Department of Defense has also secured hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to fund its secretive AI initiative known as Project Maven, a venture focused on technologies like automated target recognition and surveillance.

Note:Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI from reliable major media sources.


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