News Stories

Excerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media

Below are highly revealing excerpts of key news stories from the major media that suggest major cover-ups and corruption. Links are provided to the full stories on their media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These news stories are listed by date posted. You can explore the same list by order of importance or by date of news story. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

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

Lockdowns during the first COVID-19 wave in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by .2% in the U.S. and Europe, according to a Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of several studies. "While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted," the researchers wrote. "In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument." The researchers – Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, Lund University economics professor Lars Jonung, and special advisor at Copenhagen's Center for Political Studies Jonas Herby – analyzed the effects of lockdown measures such as school shutdowns, business closures, and mask mandates on COVID-19 deaths. "We find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates," the researchers wrote. The researchers also examined shelter-in-place orders, finding that they reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%. Studies that looked at only shelter-in-place orders found they reduced COVID-19 mortality by 5.1%, but studies that looked at shelter-in-place orders along with other lockdown measures found that shelter-in-place orders actually increased COVID-19 mortality by 2.8%. The researchers concluded that limiting gatherings may have actually increased COVID-19 mortality. 

Note: Why did other major media platforms overlook this vitally important news? You can find this critical study on the Johns Hopkins University website at this link. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had little or no impact in reducing deaths from COVID-19, according to a new analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by about 0.2%, said the broad review of multiple scientific studies. "We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality," the researchers wrote. But the research paper said lockdowns did have "devastating effects" on the economy and contributed to numerous social ills. "They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy," the report said. "Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument," the paper concluded. Early on, many states and 186 countries imposed bans on work, socialization, in-person schooling, travel and other restrictions to limit the spread of the disease, citing recommendations by top health care experts. Researchers at the Imperial College London, for example, predicted that such steps could reduce death rates by up to 98%. That never happened, according to the new study by researchers Steve Hanke, Jonas Herby, and Lars Jonung at Johns Hopkins.

Note: Why did other major media platforms overlook this vitally important news? You can find this critical study on the Johns Hopkins University website at this link. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Thousands of people say they've developed tinnitus after they were vaccinated against Covid. Shaowen Bao, an associate professor in the physiology department of the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona, Tucson, believes that ongoing inflammation, especially in the brain or spinal cord, may be to blame. Bao, a longtime tinnitus sufferer and a representative of the American Tinnitus Association's scientific advisory board, has studied tinnitus for more than a decade. A Facebook group of people who developed tinnitus after getting a Covid vaccine convinced Bao to look into the possible link. One man told Bao that he couldn't hear the car radio over the noise in his head while driving. Along with ringing in their ears, participants reported a range of other symptoms, including headaches, dizziness, vertigo, ear pain, anxiety and depression. Significantly more people first developed tinnitus after the first dose of the vaccine, compared with the second. This suggests "that the vaccine is interacting with pre-existing risk factors for tinnitus. If you have the risk factor, you will probably get it from the first dose," Bao said. As of Sunday, at least 16,183 people had filed complaints with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they'd developed tinnitus, or ringing in their ears, after receiving a Covid vaccine. [Vaccine expert Dr. Gregory] Poland, who was stricken with tinnitus after he received his Covid vaccines two years ago, suggested that the CDC remains "unconcerned" about these reports of tinnitus.

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

For the past decade, the White House and Congress have relied on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a renowned advisory group, to help shape the federal response to the opioid crisis, whether by convening expert panels or delivering policy recommendations and reports. Yet officials with the National Academies have kept quiet about one thing: their decision to accept roughly $19 million in donations from members of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin that is notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic. The opioid crisis has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, spawned lawsuits and forced other institutions to publicly distance themselves from Sackler money or to acknowledge potential conflicts of interest from ties to Purdue Pharma. The National Academies has largely avoided such scrutiny as it continues to advise the government on painkillers. Institutions that more publicly examined their use of Sackler donations include Tufts University, which released a review of possible conflicts of interest related to pain research education funded by Purdue Pharma. Concerns noted in the report included a senior Purdue executive's delivering lectures to students each semester. The World Health Organization in 2019 retracted two guidance documents on opioid policy after lawmakers aired concerns about ties to opioid makers, including a Purdue subsidiary, among report authors and funders.

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

A MintPress News investigation has found dozens of ex-U.S. State Department officials working in key positions at TikTok. Many more individuals with backgrounds in the FBI, CIA and other departments of the national security state also hold influential posts at the social media giant, affecting the content that over one billion users see. The influx of State Department officials into TikTok's upper ranks is a consequence of "Project Texas," an initiative the company began in 2020 in the hopes of avoiding being banned altogether in the United States. During his time in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led the charge to shut the platform down, frequently labeling it a "spying app" and a "propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party." It was widely reported that the U.S. government had forced the sale of TikTok to Walmart and then Microsoft. But in late 2020, as Project Texas began, those deals mysteriously fell through, and the rhetoric about the dangers of TikTok from officials evaporated. Project Texas is a $1.5 billion security operation to move the company's data to Austin. In doing so, it announced that it was partnering with tech giant Oracle, a corporation that, as MintPress has reported on, is the CIA in all but name. Evidently, Project Texas also secretly included hiring all manner of U.S. national security state personnel to oversee the company's operations – and not just from the State Department. Virtually every branch of the national security state is present at TikTok.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in intelligence agencies and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

Dr. Peter Gøtzsche is a well known Danish physician with four decades of research experience, publishing 97 papers in the "big five" (BMJ, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and New England Journal of Medicine) and 19 Cochrane reviews. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration. Gøtzsche, along with ... Maryanne Demasi, PhD, have published a new paper titled "Serious harms of the COVID-19 Vaccines: A Systematic Review." It's been a task for academics to look into this phenomenon given the fact that vaccine manufacturers and drug regulators never allowed independent researchers to examine the raw trial data, forcing transparency advocates to sue the FDA for access to the documents. The adenovirus vector vaccines increased the risk of venous thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. (Authorities have responded by suspending the use of AstraZeneca's vaccine across many European countries, and in the US, regulators have advised restricted use of Janssen's vaccine). The mRNA-based vaccines increased the risk of myocarditis, with a mortality of about 1-2 per 200 cases. It was more common in younger males. We found evidence of serious neurological harms, including Bell's Palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myasthenic disorder and stroke, which are likely due to an autoimmune reaction from mRNA and adenoviral vector vaccines. Severe harms, i.e. those that prevent daily activities, were underreported in the randomized trials.

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

A 17-year-old boy ... received the Air Force's highest science award in the 1960s. This young man had the audacity and guts to build and test a new and unusual rocket. The boy's name was David Adair, and the engine he built was a nuclear-fusion electromagnetic containment engine. This rocket was tested successfully and had an eventful landing in that land beyond lands that doesn't exist, the famous Area 51. This vehicle had the capability of achieving light speed and, according to the builder, was capable of exceeding light speed with capabilities to propel an interstellar ship to the stars. Where did David Adair, now head of Intersect Inc. in Atlanta, get the design for this engine? As he tells it, directly from NASA. The organization evidently had 18 engine designs, and guess what? Only two were solid- or liquid-propelled rocket engines. This was in the 1960s. I wonder what happened to the rest of those engine types in the past 30 years. I also wonder what type of engines have been and are being tested at the old Rocketdyne facility in the Santa Susana Mountains above Simi Valley. One might ask if the massive class-action lawsuit against Rocketdyne, which alleges contamination of the nuclear type, has any relationship to the engines that were developed and continue to be developed today. If we look at some of these modern concepts and then consider the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation, it doesn't seem quite so impossible.

Note: Don't miss this mind-blowing video of prodigy rocket scientist David Adair describing a most stunning and intriguing encounter with an ET craft in an underground hanger at Area 51. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.

When Stephen Buchmann finds a wayward bee on a window inside his Tucson, Arizona, home, he goes to great lengths to capture and release it unharmed. This March, Buchmann released a book that unpacks just how varied and powerful a bee's mind really is. The book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees, draws from his own research and dozens of other studies to paint a remarkable picture of bee behavior and psychology. It argues that bees can demonstrate sophisticated emotions resembling optimism, frustration, playfulness and fear, traits more commonly associated with mammals. Experiments have shown bees can experience PTSD-like symptoms, recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and maybe even dream. Approximately one-third of the American diet, including many fruits, vegetables and nuts, relies on bees for pollination. In the past, bee research has focused on their role in crop pollination, but the work being pioneered by Buchmann and his contemporaries could force an ethical reckoning with how the animals are treated. Can large-scale agriculture and scientific research continue without causing bees to suffer, and is the dominant western culture even capable of accepting that the tiniest of creatures have feelings, too? Buchmann hopes an ethical shift will happen as details about the emotional lives of invertebrates – especially bees – are shared with the public.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

An intriguing claim that human brain cells possess crystals of a highly magnetic mineral known as magnetite was described today by Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, a professor at the California Institute of Technology. The 38-year-old geobiologist said he believed that magnetite crystals enabled animals from bees to whales to navigate by using the earth's magnetic field. He said he doubted that they supported any sensory capability in humans, although he suspected that they might account for the possible influence of strong electromagnetic fields on human health. That magnetite, one of the hardest metals on earth, is synthesized by the human brain "is sure to astound most scientists," Dr. Kirschvink said, but what it is doing there is a "total mystery." It might be a vestige from evolution and serve no purpose, he said. Or it could play a role in biology, explaining why electromagnetic fields have been associated with brain cancer and leukemia and why certain odd blips, called spin echoes, show up on magnetic resonance images of the brain. Each human brain on average contains seven billion particles of magnetite, weighing a total of one-millionth of an ounce. Magnetite interacts over a million times more strongly with external magnetic fields than any other biological material, Dr. Kirschvink said, including the iron in red blood cells. If only one cell in a million contains magnetite, he said, magnetic fields could exert an effect on the tissue.

Note: Robert O. Becker's classic book "The Body Electric" presents amazing scientific experiments showing the importance of electrical fields and magnetic crystals in the human body. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae – similar to how nerve cells transmit information in humans. It has even shown that the firing rate of these impulses increases when the hyphae of wood-digesting fungi come into contact with wooden blocks, raising the possibility that fungi use this electrical "language" to share information about food or injury with distant parts of themselves, or with hyphae-connected partners such as trees. Prof Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England's unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol analysed the patterns of electrical spikes generated by four species of fungi – enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi. The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these "fungal word lengths" closely matched those of human languages. The most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the fungi's integrity – analogous to wolves howling to maintain the integrity of the pack – or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of their mycelia, Adamtzky suggested.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

The last time a trove of leaked documents exposed U.S. spying operations around the world, the reaction from allied governments was swift and severe. In Berlin, thousands of people protested in the streets, the C.I.A. station chief was expelled, and the German chancellor told the American president that "spying on friends is not acceptable." In Paris, the American ambassador was summoned for a dressing-down. That was a decade ago, after an enormous leak of classified documents detailing American surveillance programs by ... Edward Snowden. The latest leak of classified documents that appeared online this year, the motive behind which remains unknown, has again illustrated the broad reach of U.S. spy agencies, including into the capitals of friendly countries such as Egypt, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates. Though the documents mainly focus on the war in Ukraine, they include C.I.A. intelligence briefs describing conversations and plans at senior levels of government in those countries, in several cases attributed to "signals intelligence," or electronic eavesdropping. Unlike in 2013, however, U.S. allies appear to be mostly shrugging off the latest examples of apparent spying. So far, the only evident political fallout from the latest leaks has occurred in South Korea, where one classified U.S. document described a debate among senior national security officials about whether to send artillery shells abroad that might wind up in Ukraine, potentially angering Russia.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The story of Bruno Bréguet, one the most enigmatic figures of the shadowy battle between western security services and international violent extremists during the so-called "golden age of terrorism" in the 1970s and 1980s, has been given a new twist. A new book has revealed that in his later years Bréguet served not only the infamous Illich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, but the US government too. Bréguet's spying for the CIA earned him tens of thousands of dollars, and contributed to the capture of his erstwhile boss by French secret services in 1994. The news that the CIA was prepared to hire as an agent a man like Bréguet, who had been twice convicted by Israel and France for his terrorist activities and is believed to have bombed a pro-democracy radio station in Munich funded by the US government, underlines the moral and ethical questions facing intelligence services when it comes to recruiting such individuals. If anyone in the CIA balked at employing Bréguet as an agent, there is no record of their concerns. For the next four years, Bréguet appears to have supplied information to the CIA, possibly indirectly contributing key elements to the French intelligence operation that successfully grabbed Carlos from a clinic in Khartoum in 1994. Breguet's final mystery remains unresolved however. In 1995, the veteran extremist turned CIA agent disappeared definitively after boarding a ferry from a Greece to Italy. Was he murdered? Or did he commence a new life under a false identity?

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

After flying under the radar for years, the case of Genaro GarcĂ­a Luna is finally raising alarms in Congress, with one of the Senate's top Republicans demanding answers about how Mexico's highest-ranking cop was able to partner with DEA and FBI, "at the time that he funneled roughly 103,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States" for the Sinaloa Cartel. GarcĂ­a Luna became the most senior Mexican law enforcement official ever convicted of narco-corruption when a Brooklyn federal jury delivered a unanimous guilty verdict on a five-count indictment that charged him with taking massive bribes to enable cartel drug smuggling, kidnappings, and murders while he was in office from 2001 to 2012. GarcĂ­a Luna's position involved close collaboration with U.S. anti-narcotics agencies that operate in Mexico, and it gave him discretion over the spending of hundreds of millions in American tax dollars delivered as security aid. That money was supposed to go toward fighting the cartels, but his trial showed he was leaking sensitive intelligence, protecting drug shipments, and disrupting efforts to capture ... cartel leaders. On Feb. 22, a day after the guilty verdict, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the heads of the DEA and FBI asking what the agencies knew about GarcĂ­a Luna and when, and demanding evidence ... that could shed new light on the relationship. In short, Grassley wants to know if American tax dollars were being sent to Mexico while the DEA and FBI were tolerating GarcĂ­a Luna's corruption.

Note: This case adds to the evidence that the War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

We have long known about the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover's animus toward the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover built an extensive apparatus of surveillance and disruption designed to destroy King. It's time to ... recognize the power structure that supported the F.B.I.'s campaign. Many Americans – starting with the president – thought movement activists like King posed threats to the established order and needed to be watched and controlled. Members of the press could have exposed the bureau's campaign. And many government officials who could have stopped, curtailed or exposed the F.B.I.'s attack on King instead enabled or encouraged it. F.B.I. records declassified in the past several years and documents from the Johnson archives released in 2022 force us to reconsider the nature of Johnson's involvement in the F.B.I.'s campaign against King. White House documents ... suggest that Johnson, from the beginning of his presidency in 1963 to King's assassination in 1968, was apprised almost weekly by Hoover himself on the F.B.I.'s surveillance of King. Johnson did nothing to stop or rein in the F.B.I., even after at least one top administration official expressed concern. In addition to the president and the media, other officials at the F.B.I. ... worked to ruin King. Scores of ranking officials and agents at the F.B.I., dozens of elected officials and several informants embedded in King's inner circles knew what was going on, and none, as far as the public records indicate, blew a whistle on the campaign.

Note: Few people know about the 1999 King Family civil trial in Memphis, where it took a jury only one hour to find the U.S. government guilty for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that six countries–the U.S., Russia, France, China, Germany, and Italy–were responsible for 80 percent of global weapons exports from 2018 to 2022. The U.S. alone counted for 40 percent, while Russia was a distant second at 16 percent. Maintaining and growing their market share is a prerogative for countries that export weapons. Turkey has sold many drones to Ukraine, while Iran has sold its own arsenal to Russia. Both Turkey and Iran are aiming to pitch their products as low-cost alternatives to Western manufacturers. Turkey, however, is still in talks to buy Russia's S-400 missile defense system. Its provision of weapons to Ukraine, while it continues to negotiate weapons deals with Russia, demonstrates the complicated nature of the global arms industry. The war in Ukraine continues to underline how integral the arms industry is to geopolitics. China, for example, has not provided weapons to either Ukraine or Russia, but its largest civilian drone maker, DJI, is one of the most important suppliers for their militaries. The U.S. has been criticized in recent years for its weapons exports to Saudi Arabia, which is under fire for human rights abuses and for its conflict in Yemen.  And though claims of Western weapons being smuggled out of Ukraine have often been dismissed, there is concern that many of the weapons sent to the Ukrainian military have or will end up on the black market.

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

The U.S. corporate media's first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare "nothing to see here," and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to "a protracted war beyond 2023," as one of the documents says. We can't help wondering what President Biden's plan could be, or if he even has one. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a "total breakdown" between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. According to Hersh's report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation and war from reliable sources.

A set of secret national security documents burst into public view last week. The intelligence documents appear to have entered the public domain in an unusual way – someone began sharing them, starting late last year, on an obscure Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. The alleged leaker, Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested. It is traditional for the government to exaggerate the alleged harms of classified information becoming public, and this appears to be happening again. The real problem isn't what's leaked, but what's classified. Almost every news story about the latest disclosures has noted that the Pentagon and other government agencies will now put tighter lids on secret documents, even though, as historian Matthew Connelly points out in his new book, "The Declassification Engine," the government already puts way too much material behind its moat. In fact, the human harm caused by unauthorized leaks is almost always inflicted by the government itself in the form of egregious prosecutions of leakers. Although Snowden, [Chelsea] Manning, and, more recently, Reality Winner, revealed secrets that the public had a right to know, the government charged all of them under the draconian Espionage Act. While Snowden sought safety in Russia, Manning served seven years in prison (she was originally sentenced to 35 years), and Winner was sentenced to more than five years for leaking just a single document.

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

The neoliberal globalizing paradigm is now the old. Economic nationalism is the new. Neoliberal globalization ... celebrated the profits and growth brought to both private and state-owned/operated enterprises around the world. It downplayed or ignored the other sides of globalization: (1) growing income and wealth inequalities; (2) the shift of production from old to new centers of capitalism; and (3) faster growth of output and markets in new centers than old centers. Instead of a mostly private capitalist system (like that of the U.S. or UK) or a mostly state capitalist system (like that of the USSR), places like China and India produced hybrids. Strong national governments presided over coexisting large private and state sectors to maximize economic growth. The days of the U.S. dollar as the supreme global currency are numbered. U.S. supremacy in high-tech industries must already be shared with China's high-tech industries. The U.S. empire's decline raises the question of what comes next. The most interesting possibility and perhaps the likeliest is that China and the entire BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) grouping of nations will undertake the construction and maintenance of a new world economy. The war in Ukraine has already enhanced the prospects of such an outcome by strengthening the BRICS alliance. They have the population, resources, productive capacity, connections, and accumulated solidarity to be a new pole for world economic development.  

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

In 2010, Chelsea Manning shocked the world with leaked documents that exposed abuses and crimes committed by the United States military in Iraq. These revelations also made the publisher of those documents, Julian Assange, and his organization, WikiLeaks, household names. The U.S. government [is] charging Assange – a publisher – with violating the Espionage Act. Under the Espionage Act, one does not have the ability to make a public interest defense. All prosecutors have to do is show that a whistleblower possessed documents or transferred "national defense information" to a member of the press. Damage has already been done, but the future of journalism is in further jeopardy if the U.S. government holds a trial against Assange, convicts him, and shows the world that it has the final say over who is and is not a journalist. CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other officials sketched plans to target Assange that included poisoning or kidnapping him. This, along with the disruption campaign against WikiLeaks, represented the CIA's all-out war against a dissident media organization. The agency went so far as to redefine the organization as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" to carry out operations that it could never get away with against a group of journalists. It should be the subject of an intense investigation in Congress, and the Justice Department should be dropping the charges after publicly conceding that the CIA's actions mean Assange could never have a fair trial.

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

The U.S. has not engaged in a defensive war for nearly 80 years, instead destabilizing governments worldwide in Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula, Iraq, Afghanistan, throughout Africa and across Latin America. Although all weapons of mass destruction in space are technically prohibited by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it isn't without precedent for major military powers to withdraw from such treaties. In 2019, President Donald Trump diverged from President Barack Obama's promise he would "not weaponize space," and created an official Space Force. Countersurveillance and counter-communications have been central goals of U.S. military space operations since the 1990s, alongside attaining U.S. "full spectrum dominance" of all potential conflict sites – including space. Space infrastructure ... increases the risk of global nuclear war by presenting new opportunities for armament and hostility. The government's ability to militarize this technology is strongly related to investment and development in the private sector through companies such as Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin. The commercial arm of the military-industrial complex is extending into space. Along with Blue Origin, SpaceX has collaborated with DOD in developing rapid global military cargo delivery systems, which the DOD hopes will make for global military logistics – delivery of supplies, weapons and even human soldiers anywhere on earth – in under 60 minutes.

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

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