Government Corruption News Articles

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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.

Senators from both parties accused the Defense Department on Wednesday of obstructing an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The complaints came after the Pentagon blocked several witnesses from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing on Wednesday. The only testimony provided by the Defense Department came from a senior official who would say only that he did not know whether the claims were true. But members of the panel, led by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said they regarded as credible assertions by current and former officers in the program. The officers have said they were prevented by the Pentagon from sharing information about Mr. Atta and others with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Pentagon has acknowledged that at least five members of Able Danger have said they recall a chart produced in 2000 that identified Mr. Atta, who became the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot, as a potential terrorist.

When the Federal Emergency Management Agency's paperwork slowed the evacuation of patients from the airport, Acadian's frustrated medics waited with empty helicopters. "At one point I had 10 helicopters on the ground waiting to go," said Marc Creswell, an Acadian medic, "but FEMA kept stonewalling us with paperwork. Meanwhile, every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying." The company sent in outside doctors and nurses. FEMA rejected the help because the doctors and nurses weren't certified members of a National Disaster Medical Team. "When the doctors asked why they couldn't help these critically ill people lying there unattended," Mr. Creswell recalled, "the FEMA people kept saying, 'You're not federalized.' "

The underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and how America was misled into that war. In 2002 President Bush, having decided to invade Iraq, was casting about for a casus belli. The weapons of mass destruction theme was not yielding very much until a dubious Italian intelligence report ... provided reason to speculate that Iraq might be trying to buy so-called yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger. the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, an old Africa hand, to Niger to investigate. Mr. Wilson spent eight days talking to everyone in Niger possibly involved and came back to report no sign of an Iraqi bid for uranium. Ignoring Wilson's report, Cheney talked on TV about Iraq's nuclear potential. And the president himself, in his 2003 State of the Union address no less, pronounced: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson directly challenged the administration with a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed headlined, "What I didn't find in Africa," and making clear his belief that the president deliberately manipulated intelligence in order to justify an invasion. Three days later, Bob Novak's column appeared giving Wilson's wife's name, Valerie Plame, and the fact she was an undercover CIA officer. Enough is known to surmise that the leaks of Rove, or others deputized by him, amounted to retaliation against someone who had the temerity to challenge the president of the United States. The role of Rove and associates added up to a small incident in a very large scandal - the effort to delude America into thinking it faced a threat dire enough to justify a war.

A panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations wants the United States to focus not on the defense of our own borders, but rather create what effectively would be a common border that includes Mexico and Canada. CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: On Capitol Hill, testimony [is] calling for Americans to start thinking like citizens of North America and treat the U.S., Mexico and Canada like one big country. That's the view in a report called "Building a North American Community." It envisions a common border around the U.S., Mexico and Canada in just five years, a border pass for residents of the three countries, and a freer flow of goods and people. [Task force member Robert] PASTOR: What we hope to accomplish by 2010 is a common external tariff which will mean that goods can move easily across the border. We want a common security perimeter around all of North America. ROMANS: Security experts say folding Mexico and Canada into the U.S. is a grave breach of that sovereignty. [The report calls for] temporary migrant worker programs expanded with full mobility of labor between the three countries in the next five years. The idea here is to make North America more like the European Union. [CNN Anchor Lou] DOBBS: Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad at a time when three-and-a-half years, approaching four years after September 11, we still don't have border security. And this group of elites is talking about not defending our borders, finally, but rather creating new ones. It's astonishing.

Note: This agenda is being promoted in key political forums with practically no media reporting. For one of the few media articles reporting on this important topic, click here.

It is no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everyone else behind is not widely known. The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell. Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay ... taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. From 1950 to 1970 ... for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000. An Internal Revenue Service study found that the only taxpayers whose share of taxes declined in 2001 and 2002 were those in the top 0.1 percent. Some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth.

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

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

A federal appeals court rejected a fired FBI contractor's bid to revive her lawsuit against the government. Sibel Edmonds said she was fired from her job as a wiretap translator because she told superiors she suspected that a co-worker was leaking information to targets of an ongoing FBI investigation. The FBI said it fired her because she committed security violations and disrupted the office. The Justice Department's inspector general said Edmonds's allegations about a coworker "raised serious concerns that, if true, could potentially have extremely damaging consequences for the FBI."

Note: This article doesn't even mention 9/11, yet Ms. Edmonds has stated publicly that her testimony would put top government officials behind bars for their role in blocking information which could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. For more eye-opening information, click here and here. Read Ms. Edmond's open letter to the chairman of the 9/11 Commission to find out what key people in government don't want you to know about her testimony. See also her excellent website http://www.justacitizen.com  She was also instrumental in forming a National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Colin Powell does not need more humiliation. But yesterday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring. Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants ... make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. The public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't. [Found there] were the internal documents of the supposed al-Qaida cell planning the "big one" in Britain. But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is a poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings. All the information roads led west, not to Kabul but to California and the US midwest. The recipes for ricin now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon. The chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al- Qaida manual" into the case. To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s ... was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook. We have all been victims of this mass deception.

Note: As the above link no longer functions, click here for the full article. According to a post on Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's excellent Center for Research on Globalization website and other inside sources, the British government ordered the above article removed from the website within a week of its publication. Someone doesn't want us knowing how we are manipulated into fear. For more on this, click here.

in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Iran. "I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operating in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed." Halliburton says the operation — videotaped by NBC News — is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based outside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions. Other U.S. oil services companies, like Weatherford and Baker Hughes, also are in Iran. And foreign subsidiaries of NBC's parent company, General Electric, have sold equipment to Iran. For Halliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran must be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer approached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they said only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran.

Frederick Burks believes in UFOs, communes with dolphins, [and] runs a Web site that promotes conspiracy theories about U.S. complicity in the 9/11 attacks. And, until last October, he had the ear of the world's most powerful man ... George W. Bush. When President Bush traveled to Bali for a meeting with President Megawati in October 2003 ... [Karen] Brooks, then the National Security Council's Indonesia expert, says she personally requested that he get the job because he was so good and "Megawati loved him." Now Mr. Burks has popped up in Jakarta as a star witness for the defense in the terrorism trial of a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. Speaking to the Jakarta court in fluent Indonesian, Mr. Burks described a secret 2002 meeting between a U.S. presidential envoy and Indonesia's then president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Mr. Burks's testimony, delivered last month in a south Jakarta court, turned the former White House interpreter ... into a national celebrity here in Indonesia. While working as Mr. Bush's Indonesian-language interpreter, Mr. Burks set up several Web sites, including momentoflove.org, weboflove.org and WantToKnow.info. After 9/11, he began collecting and then posting documents he believes show that parts of the U.S. government knew an attack was coming and may even have been complicit in its execution. "I'm sometimes labeled a conspiracy theorist, but I'm not," he says. "I'm someone who can handle dark energy, the really ugly things that are going on behind the scenes, without getting too upset."

Note: This article surprisingly was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The above link requires payment to read the full article. To read it free and learn much more, click here.

The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals. Some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the United States government and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including the C.I.A.'s recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators. For nearly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records. The dispute has not previously been made public. The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II. Historians who have studied the documents made public so far have said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's campaign to exterminate Jews, had worked for the CIA. The records also indicate that the CIA tried to recruit two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Among former Nazis who were given refuge in the United States was Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who developed the V-2 rocket in World War II for the Nazis and played a major role in the development of the American space program.

Note: Operation Paperclip involved secretly importing hundreds of Nazi scientists into the U.S. and providing them with aliases and influential work in U.S. government and intelligence services. Some of them were known experts in mind control techniques. For more reliable information, click here.

Joyce Ann Hafford died without ever holding the son she had tried to save from contracting AIDS by taking an experimental drug regimen administered by government-funded researchers during her pregnancy. But even before her stunned family could grieve, the 33-year-old's death was reverberating among the government's top scientists in Washington. They quickly realized the drugs the HIV-positive woman from Memphis, Tenn., was taking likely caused the liver failure that killed her. Hafford's family members say they were never told NIH had concluded that the experimental drug regimen likely caused her death until the Associated Press gave them copies of NIH's internal case documents this month. They were left to believe Hafford had died from AIDS complications. "They tried to make it sound like she was just sick. They never connected it to the drug," said Rubbie King, Hafford's sister. NIH officials acknowledge that experimental drugs, most likely nevirapine, caused her death. The study during which Hafford died recently led researchers to conclude that nevirapine poses risks when taken over time by certain pregnant women. The family says Hafford seemed unaware of the liver risks. They even kept the bottle of nevirapine showing it had no safety warnings.

Note: If you want to understand just how corrupt and deceitful medical research doctors can be, read the stunning article on this case at this link. This article mentions the little-known fact that "a majority of HIV-positive tests, when retested, come back indeterminate or negative. In many cases, different results emerge from the same blood tested in different labs."

The FBI has shut down some 20 sites which were part of an alternative media network known as Indymedia. A US court order forced the firm hosting the material to hand over two servers in the UK used by the group. Indymedia says it is a news source for the anti-globalisation movement and other social justice issues. The reasons behind the seizure are unclear but the FBI has reportedly said the action was taken at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities. The servers affected were run by Rackspace, a US web hosting company with offices in London. It said it had received a court order from the US authorities last Thursday to hand over the computer equipment at its UK hosting facility. The reasons behind the action against the Indymedia websites are unclear. The group said the servers affected had hosted the sites of more then 20 local collectives and audio streams for several radio stations, as well as several other projects. The seizure has sparked off protests from journalist groups. "The constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure," said EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

Note: This important news was not covered by any major U.S. media. Why? Is it a coincidence that these websites were taken down shortly after they started promoting a video clip showing President Bush may have been using an electronic hearing aid during the presidential election debates with John Kerry? Website founder Fred Burks had personal experience suggesting Bush may have used electronic feeds in high-level meetings while Burks worked as a language interpreter for him. For more, click here.

[Tony] Podesta is counted among the nation's most important contemporary art collectors. Inside the elite Chelsea galleries, he and his wife, Heather, are gossiped about. All the art stars know their names. In Washington, the couple is recognized, too. Podesta, 60, has ridden a long career on Capitol Hill to his current perch as a top-tier lobbyist. He spearheaded President Clinton's successful 1996 Pennsylvania campaign. Tony and Heather don't shy away from discomfort -- especially when they can inflict it, ever so gently, on others. Tony favors art with in-your-face nudity and social critique. Tony's younger brother John (yes, that John, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff) admires his choices. A piece in the[ir] Woodley Park living room, [a] nearly eight-foot-tall color photo by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood [is] an update of a late-15th-century painting of the dead Jesus. Taylor-Wood faithfully replicates the original ... in vivid color and minute detail. Just one thing: Taylor-Wood omits the shroud, displaying his subject in all his nakedness. "You've got to be pretty secure to have an eight-foot-tall naked man in your living room in Washington, D.C.," Heather says. Folks attending a house tour ... earlier this year got an eyeful when they walked into a bedroom at the Podesta residence hung with multiple color pictures by Katy Grannan, a photographer known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents' suburban homes. "They were horrified," Heather recalls, a grin spreading across her face.

Note: Tony is listed among the top 50 most important people in Washington by GC magazine, while Tony' s brother John, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, does not make the list. Both Tony and John have been implicated in the Pizzagate scandal. For undeniable evidence that there are powerful child prostitution rings which lead to the highest levels of government, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on sex abuse scandals from major media sources.

Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. The list goes on. Even while in office, many election officials are happy to accept voting machine companies' largess. Forty-three percent of the budget of the National Association of Secretaries of State comes from voting machine companies and other vendors. State governments in a growing number of states...have pushed through much-needed laws that require electronic voting machines to produce paper records. But these groups have faced intense opposition from election officials [who] argued that voter-verifiable paper trails...are impractical. While they may sincerely think that electronic voting machines are so trustworthy that there is no need for a paper record of votes, their views have to be regarded with suspicion until their conflicts are addressed.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace. Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants. Ashcroft hopes to use his self-made "enemy combatant" stamp for any citizen whom he deems to be part of a wider terrorist conspiracy. Aides have indicated that a "high-level committee" will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps. Few would have imagined any attorney general seeking to reestablish such camps for citizens. We have learned from painful experience that unchecked authority, once tasted, easily becomes insatiable. We are only now getting a full vision of Ashcroft's America. Ashcroft seems to dream of a country secured from itself, neatly contained and controlled by his judgment of loyalty. For more than 200 years, security and liberty have been viewed as coexistent values. Ashcroft and his aides appear to view this relationship as lineal, where security must precede liberty. Every generation has its test of principle in which people of good faith can no longer remain silent in the face of authoritarian ambition. If we cannot join together to fight the abomination of American camps, we have already lost what we are defending.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. This aritcle was written by Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University. Though Ashcroft resigned, the laws he crafted remain in place.

Government scientists secretly removed body parts from a national serviceman who died after taking part in nerve gas experiments, a new inquest has been told. Up to 200 separate samples were taken from 20-year-old Ronald Maddison's brain, spinal cord, heart and skin - without his family's permission - days after he died at Porton Down, Wiltshire, the government top-secret chemical warfare research base, in 1953. The body parts have since been used in a number of experiments by scientists researching the effects of toxic chemical agents on human tissue. The original inquest, held in secret in 1953, found that Leading Aircraftman Maddison's death was accidental, but the new inquest will examine fresh evidence and decide whether the original verdict still stands. Mr Maddison ... was among hundreds of national servicemen who volunteered in the 1950s and '60s to take part in tests at Porton Down in the belief that they were helping scientists find a cure for the common cold. The airman died less than an hour after 200mg of the highly toxic Sarin nerve agent was placed on layers of cloth on the inside of his arm.

The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion). Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. Of the 78 drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only 17 contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. [The] market would collapse virtually overnight if the FDA made approval of new drugs contingent on their being better in some important way than older drugs already on the market. Many medical schools and teaching hospitals set up "technology transfer" offices to ... capitalize on faculty discoveries. Medical school faculty entered into ... lucrative financial arrangements with drug companies, as did their parent institutions. One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias in medical research—exactly where such bias doesn't belong. The industry ... fought the state of Maine all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2003 upheld Maine's right to bargain with drug companies for lower prices. This industry is taking us for a ride, and there will be no real reform without an aroused and determined public to make it happen.

Note: The above book and book review was written by Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the prestigious The New England Journal of Medicine. For more reliable information on the health cover-up, click here.

The American criminal justice system relies too heavily on imprisoning people and needs to consider more effective alternatives, according to a study released Wednesday by the American Bar Assn., the nation's largest lawyers' organization. "For more than 20 years, we've gotten tougher on crime," said Dennis W. Archer, a former Detroit mayor and the group's current president. "We can no longer sit by as more and more people — particularly in minority communities — are sent away for longer and longer periods of time while we make it more and more difficult for them to return to society after they serve their time. The system is broken. We need to fix it." Both the number of incarcerated Americans and the cost of locking them up are massive, the report said, and have been escalating significantly in recent years. Between 1974 and 2002, the number of inmates in federal and state prisons rose six-fold. By 2002, 476 out of every 100,000 Americans were imprisoned. In 1982, the states and federal government spent $9 billion on jails and prisons. By 1999, the figure had risen to $49 billion. Based on trends, a black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of being imprisoned during his lifetime, while the chances for a Latino male are 1 in 6, and for a white male, 1 in 17. The report contains numerous reform proposals. Among them: the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing laws; more funding for substance abuse and mental health programs; assistance for prisoners reentering society; [and] task forces to study racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system.

Note: If above link fails, click here. The prison-industrial complex attracts huge profits and strongly supports laws like "three strikes" where third time offenders are automatically imprisoned for life, even for petty crime.

Individual Californians are shouldering an increasing percentage of the state's general fund, while the share of revenue from corporate income taxes has declined, according to a new analysis by a think tank in Sacramento. "Over time, the burden of paying for public services has, in a fairly dramatic way, shifted from businesses to individuals,'' said Jean Ross, director of the nonprofit California Budget Project in Sacramento. Ross went back more than 40 years to track how much the state derived from its three main revenue sources: personal income tax, sales tax and corporate income tax. Over time, income taxes paid by individuals have risen to fill half of the state's coffers, while corporate income taxes have fallen to about 10 percent of the take. Dan Bucks, executive director of the Multistate Tax Commission, said the decline in corporate taxes as a share of state coffers is occurring in all 47 states that levy some form of business or corporate tax. "Our data indicate that ... corporate income taxes were 9.7 percent of state revenues in 1980 and 4.9 percent in 2002,'' he said. Personal income taxes -- levied in more than 40 states -- have also risen nationwide "in a virtually straight line,'' he said. Corporations have gotten better at sheltering income from both federal and state taxes. For instance, the General Accounting Office, watchdog agency of Congress, recently reported that more than 60 percent of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes from 1996 through 2000.

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.