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.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has denied funding studies that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans after it was accused of doing so following the release of research proposals. The documents were obtained and released by The Intercept. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University ... told Newsweek these documents show "unequivocally" that NIH grants were used to fund controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China–something U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has denied. GOF research ... potentially makes the virus more dangerous to humans.. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, told Congress in May that the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." Ebright said: "The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci ... are untruthful." What the NIH has denied is funding GOF research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous, such as by improving its lethality or transmissibility. Ebright said this appeared to be false by his interpretation of the documents released by The Intercept. NIH grants supported the construction of mutant SARS-related coronaviruses. At least three of the lab-generated viruses "exhibited >10x to >100x higher viral loads in humanized mice."

Note: Read what happened when the publisher of The Real Anthony Fauci tried to place a full page ad in the New York Times for this #1 best seller. And why have all major media refused to review this book which is rated 4.8 stars on amazon and has over 2,000 footnotes to back up the claims made? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there is still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from COVID-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities and the less affluent. The best gauge of the pandemic's impact is what statisticians call excess mortality, which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of COVID-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths weren't attributed to the virus. Preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks because patients didn't receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer's. Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of "deaths of despair" from drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of excess deaths not involving COVID-19 has been especially high in US counties with more low-income households and minority residents.

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

When the Federal Reserve needed Wall Street's help with its pandemic rescue mission, it went straight to Larry Fink. The BlackRock cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer has become one of the industry's most important government whisperers. The company's new assignment is a much bigger version of one it took on after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Federal Reserve enlisted it to dispose of toxic mortgage securities. This time it will help the Fed prop up the entire corporate bond market by purchasing, on the central bank's behalf, what could become a $750 billion portfolio of debt. One part of the Fed's plan is to buy bond exchange-traded funds. BlackRock itself runs ETFs under the iShares brand, and could end up buying funds it manages. "BlackRock is acting as a fiduciary to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York," says a spokesman for the company. "As such, BlackRock will execute this mandate at the sole discretion of the bank." The arrangement is bringing new attention to the company's scale and ubiquity. "It's impossible to think of BlackRock without thinking of them as a fourth branch of government," says William Birdthistle, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. BlackRock's growth raises questions over how big and useful a company can become before its size poses a risk. And then there are the potential conflicts. One arm of BlackRock knows what the Fed is buying, while other parts of the business participating in credit markets could benefit from that knowledge.

Note: Watch an excellent documentary showing how BlackRock, Vanguard, and several other institutions are the largest shareholders in almost every major corporation you can think of. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the financial industry from reliable major media sources.

The latest threat to global health is the ongoing outbreak of the respiratory disease that was recently given the name Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19). The Covid-19 outbreak has posed critical challenges for the public health, research, and medical communities. In their Journal article, Li and colleagues provide a detailed clinical and epidemiologic description of the first 425 cases reported in the epicenter of the outbreak: the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, China. A degree of clarity is emerging from this report. The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza). Of note, there were no cases in children younger than 15 years of age. Li et al. report a mean interval of 9.1 to 12.5 days between the onset of illness and hospitalization. On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Note: The main author of this article, Anthony S. Fauci, is the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Consider the research of 12 other experts questioning the coronavirus panic. Explore also this excellent article which covers key, vitally important aspects of this pandemic that few have considered. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus pandemic from reliable major media sources.

If you don't want to know how easy it is for a canny individual - or a malicious state actor - to hack into the electronic voting technology used in the U.S., don't watch Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections. In this unnervingly persuasive HBO documentary, directors Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale marshal cyber-security experts, statisticians and lawmakers to expose cracks in the system that could easily allow hackers to affect voting results. The filmmakers' sources also include actual hackers, among them an individual who breached Alaska's voting system in 2016 just to see if he could. One of the central figures of Kill Chain is election-security expert Harri Hursti, who explains, with clarity, just how vulnerable American voting systems are. Although voting machines are supposed to be kept in secure facilities, Hursti found a widely used model for sale - on eBay. The vendor had hundreds of them. Hursti bought a few, using them to explain how easily their workings could be examined and breached. He also brought a selection of voting machines to Def Con, a three-day conference for hackers, and invited attendees to go at them; one expert quickly figured out how to shut down a machine remotely from a laptop. The U.S. voting system is, as several interviewees in Kill Chain put it, a bipartisan concern; still, as the documentary notes, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has blocked votes on the Secure Elections Act and four similar bipartisan bills.

Note: Hackers can easily breach electronic voting machines. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on elections corruption from reliable major media sources.

As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. The system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides. The Alipay Health Code, as China’s official news media has called the system, was first introduced in the eastern city of Hangzhou ... with the help of Ant Financial, a sister company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. People in China sign up through Ant’s popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code — green, yellow or red — that indicates their health status. The system is already in use in 200 cities and is being rolled out nationwide, Ant says. As soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server. The software does not make clear to users its connection to the police. In the United States, it would be akin to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using apps from Amazon and Facebook to track the coronavirus, then quietly sharing user information with the local sheriff’s office.

Note: Learn in this revealing article how China is blacklisting certain citizens using this system and "banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates." Learn more about the serious risk of the Coronavirus increasing the surveillance state in this excellent article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks. Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them. A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation. USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language. Model bills passed into law have ... limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters. In all, these copycat bills amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy. USA TODAY found more than 4,000 bills benefiting industry were introduced nationwide during the eight years it reviewed. More than 80 of those bills limit the public's ability to sue corporations, including limiting class-action lawsuits, a plaintiff's ability to offer expert testimony, and cap punitive damages for corporate wrongdoing.

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

Jeffrey Collins has watched 14 men draw their final breaths. Over 25 years at the Associated Press, the South Carolina-based journalist has repeatedly served as an observer inside the state's execution chamber, watching from feet away as prison officials kill men who were sentenced to capital punishment. South Carolina has recently kept him unusually busy, with seven back-to-back executions in 14 months. The state revived the death penalty last September after a 13-year pause caused by the decision of pharmaceutical makers to stop selling lethal injection drugs to the state. Officials acquired pentobarbital, a sedative, only after legislators passed a law shielding the identities of suppliers. That secrecy surrounding the execution process means the role of observers has never been more vital. Executions aren't filmed, making journalists' accounts the only impartial record of state-sponsored killings, their words often cited by lawyers and courts. "I don't think executions should be publicly broadcast, but I think they need to be videotaped," [said Collins]. "We don't get to see everything. With lethal injections, there could be problems if the needle isn't put in the vein correctly or the drugs are bad, but we don't get any look into either of those things. With firing squads ... the target could get placed poorly. But when the curtain opens, the target has already been placed, so we don't get to witness that either. The secrecy prevents the entire story from being told."

Note: Wrongful convictions and official misconduct have led to at least 93 innocent defendants being sentenced to death. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth obsesses over the supposed "softening" and "weakening" of American troops, the Pentagon is concealing the scale of a real threat to the lives of his military's active-duty members: a suicide crisis killing hundreds of members of the U.S. Air Force. Data The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that of the 2,278 active-duty Air Force deaths between 2010 and 2023, 926 – about 41 percent – were suicides, overdoses, or preventable deaths from high-risk behavior in a decade when combat deaths were minimal. This is the first published detailed breakdown of Air Force suicide data. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Defense Department to report suicides by year, career field, and duty status, but neither the department nor the Air Force complied. Congress has done little to enforce thorough reporting. From 2010 to 2023, active-duty maintainers had a suicide rate of 27.4 per 100,000 personnel, nearly twice the 14.2 per 100,000 among U.S. civilians – a 1.93 times higher risk. FOIA records show the most common methods were self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head and hanging. Other methods included sodium nitrite ingestion, helium inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning. [The dataset] shows a troubling pattern of preventable deaths that leaders at the senior officer level or above minimized or ignored, often claiming that releasing detailed suicide information would pose a risk to national security. Current and former service members described a fear of bullying, hazing, and professional retaliation for seeking mental health treatment.

Note: Read about the tragic traumas and suicides connected to military drone operators. A recent Pentagon study concluded that US soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on mental health and military corruption.

By law, the Central Intelligence Agency isn't allowed to operate domestically in the United States. But ... going back to its earliest years, the agency has, in fact, interfered in homeland affairs to combat dissident movements (historically, from the Left), to defend its institutional prerogatives – and, increasingly, to recruit assets among the financial elite. Two former CIA officers and one former intelligence official told me that the [CIA's National Resources Division] is conspicuously absent from the Epstein debate. This, even as the NR must have conducted interviews with the man going back decades. The NR should also have maintained records of those conversations, according to all three officials. Under Attorney General Guideline 12333, intelligence officers, including those serving in the NR, are required to report criminal wrongdoing to the Department of Justice during the course of their investigations. But over scotch and soda on the 50th floor, why would an officer ask, and an executive tell, anything other than what both parties want to hear? "It is inconceivable given Jeffrey Epstein's travel record and associations that he was not approached by the NR at some point before his death," one former CIA officer said. "It would have left the New York NR division in the lurch not to have contacted him." And if that's the case, there should be a paper trail. "Every walk-in, every contact, every handling, every meeting, every termination – you are supposed to document it."

Note: This article exposes the CIA's hidden entanglement with Wall Street, revealing that officers in its National Resources Division not only mingled with top bankers and hedge-fund managers but even authorized them to collect private paychecks while on the CIA payroll, blurring the line between national security and corporate profit and creating a secret web of influence that Epstein was almost certainly a part of. US attorney Alexander Acosta was once told Epstein "belonged to intelligence, and to leave it alone." Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Andre Daigle, 27, went missing on June 9, 1987, after a night of drinks and pool with friends, following which, the New Orleans resident was never seen alive again. Four days later, Andre's sister Elise, who lived out in California, went to psychic Rosemarie Kerr of Cypress with her brother's photo, whose body and killers were found 13 days later thanks to the clairvoyant. In researching the validity of psychics in police work, Euro Weekly News came across a highly surprising and unexpected 5-page US DoJ report published in 1993 entitled "Psychics and Police Work." "The usefulness of psychics in police investigations is controversial, but psychics have long been and will undoubtedly continue to be involved in unsolved criminal investigations," it reads. The Department of Justice document compares the work of psychics and detectives, saying "both base their work on intuition to some extent, and then they specifically mention one psychic who they say helped police in thousands of cases." In an August 2000 CIA document entitled "Use of Psychics in Law Enforcement," the US intelligence agency acknowledged that psychics have been helpful to police in many cases and outlined some guidelines on when and how to deal with them. "Psychics have provided information that was helpful to law enforcement, contributing to the successful resolution of cases," the CIA confirms. "Using psychics can be legitimate when traditional methods fail."

Note: Explore our resources on remote viewing programs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.

Recently declassified CIA documents revealed a strange and disturbing history of covert operations that veered into the surreal. One of the most unusual plans, dating back to the 1950s, involved airdropping extra-large condoms labelled "small" or "medium" over Soviet territories to intimidate enemy soldiers and lower morale. In another covert attempt at psychological warfare, the CIA in 2005 commissioned GI Joe creator Donald Levine to design an Osama Bin Laden action figure with a face that would peel off in sunlight to reveal a demonic visage. Only three prototypes were ever made. Among the most notorious CIA initiatives was Project MKUltra, launched in 1953, which aimed to explore mind control through 149 secret experiments. Some of these were conducted without subjects' consent. In one extreme case, a Kentucky patient was allegedly given LSD for 179 consecutive days. Another experiment involved hypnotising women to commit acts of violence, with no memory of the events afterwards. Most MKUltra files were destroyed in 1973, but the surviving records paint a grim picture of unethical and at times criminal behaviour. One of the CIA's most controversial programmes was Operation Paperclip, launched after World War II. It brought over 1,600 former Nazi scientists – including SS officers – into the United States. Figures like Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus were instrumental in the US space programme, despite their Nazi affiliations.

Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

Five years ago, at the urging of federal officials, much of the United States locked down to stop the spread of COVID – a decision that, over time, polarized the country and changed the relationship between many Americans and their government. Now, two prominent political scientists are making the case that there's no clear evidence that those lockdowns saved lives and that it's time for a national reckoning about the decision-making that led to those lockdowns in the first place. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee [wrote] about [it in] their new book "In COVID's Wake." The biggest theme that runs through the book [is that] truth-seeking institutions did not function as well as they should have during COVID. There was a premature policy consensus. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course correct over the course of the pandemic as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct. There wasn't enough public deliberation about these matters. Too much power was accorded to narrow experts in public health and epidemiology, in particular. There should have been a wider conversation simply involving many more people with broader expertise. But it also should have involved ordinary people in the public, who after all, were being the ones asked to make sacrifices.

Note: The full text of this article is available here. Watch our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption.

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. Officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. A March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no "laboratory-based scenario" for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, "The lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."

Note: Watch our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. Read how the NIH bypassed the oversight process, allowing controversial gain-of-function experiments to proceed unchecked. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and COVID corruption.

In April of 1972, Russell Targ, a Columbia-trained physicist with an unusual interest in the paranormal, met with the Office of Scientific Intelligence, a secretive branch of the CIA that monitored biological warfare, nuclear weapons and guided missiles during the Cold War. Their Soviet enemies, who had likely been experimenting with drugs, hypnotism, yoga and black magic, were now reportedly moving inanimate objects with their minds. From a military standpoint, the implications were horrifying. So the U.S. government brokered a deal: For an initial investment of $874, or just under $7,000 in today's dollars, Targ and his colleague, fellow physicist Harold Puthoff, would test the feasibility of using psychic spies at their Menlo Park lab. The operation, called Stargate, would go on to explore whether ordinary civilians could locate clandestine military facilities across the world using their hidden third eye. According to archived news reports, in total, officials spent $20 million on the secret program. Almost immediately, "curious" data started to emerge: Subjects began describing secret locations thousands of miles away with frightening accuracy. Others reportedly levitated small weights with their minds, while some allegedly controlled temperatures and read information inside sealed envelopes. One man, Patrick Price, who later became known as the SRI's "psychic treasure," was especially prolific. "We want to make it clear," [Targ] told reporters in 1976, "that the functioning is ordinary, rather than extraordinary. It is a regular human capability."

Note: Read more about the CIA's psychic spies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the mysterious nature of reality.

A secret list of more than 300 people who belonged to a network that called publicly for the legalisation of sex with children has been handed to the BBC. A small number of those named on the list may still have contact with children. They were all members of a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The Metropolitan Police had the list for about 20 years from the late 1970s. Most PIE members were based in the UK - but there are also details of people in other parts of western Europe, Australia and the US. The BBC has established that a small number of the men are still alive and may currently be in contact with, or have care of, children through paid work or volunteering. PIE was formed in 1974. Its leaders sought to further their cause by attempting to align themselves with feminist, anti-racist and gay rights movements. It was not an illegal organisation and cost Ł4 a year to join, and to receive its members' magazine. Over a decade, PIE spokesmen gave interviews to the media arguing that adults and children had a human right to have sex with each other. Four years old, they argued, was an age at which most children could give consent. Records ... for 45% of the people on the list [showed] that half of them had been convicted or cautioned (or had been charged and died before trial) for sexual offences against children. Charges included distributing abuse images, kidnap and rape.

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

One day last spring, the investigative journalist Alex Renton received an unusual email. It contained a scan of a typewritten document marked with the dates 1983/1984, which appeared to be an authentic list of members of an organisation known as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). PIE operated legally in the UK for a decade from 1974 until the mid-1980s, lobbying publicly for a change in the age of consent – proposing in 1977 that there shouldn't be one at all. PIE members received a magazine, Magpie, which included news, non-nude photographs of children and a "contact page". PIE was disbanded in 1984 after several prosecutions relating to child pornography and conspiracy to promote indecent acts via the contact page. There were more than 300 names on the member list that Renton now had in his possession, a number of which he already knew. The police had the list from the late 1970s, Renton says. He and his team were able to find further information for around 45 per cent of the names on the list and discovered that half of these had convictions or cautions, or had been charged and died before trial, for sexual offences against children. And 65 members, Renton notes, "worked in what we now call regulated professions, which are child facing. "We've got about 30 teachers, as well as social workers, clergy, doctors. There's a number of eminent psychologists and quite a large sector of people in youth work."

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) has agreed to pay $115m to more than 100 survivors of a major sexual abuse scandal, a historic settlement of litigation that exposed widespread misconduct of officers at a federal prison. The payout settles 103 claims of sexual abuse and retaliation for reporting misconduct by people who were incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a troubled women's institution located in California. Staff harassment and assault of those in custody at FCI Dublin ... was pervasive and widely documented, and the facility was known internally as the "rape club". Seven former Dublin employees, including the warden who ran the prison and the chaplain, have been criminally convicted of sexual crimes, and more than 20 other employees were placed on leave and under investigation. The bureau announced the permanent closure of Dublin earlier this month, and former residents have been transferred to other federal prisons across the country. The settlement appears to be the largest single payout in BoP history. The agreement is a major victory for advocates fighting misconduct in women's prisons, who have documented how sexual abuse is a systemic problem across the US prison system. Staff have sexually abused incarcerated residents in at least two-thirds of federal women's prisons over the last decade, with some women abused for months and years, a US Senate inquiry found in 2022.

Note: To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Industry advocates have established a "private social network" to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops in Africa, Europe and other parts of the world, while also denigrating organic and other alternative farming methods. In 2017, two United Nations experts called for a treaty to strictly regulate dangerous pesticides, which they said were a "global human rights concern", citing scientific research showing pesticides can cause cancers, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and other health problems. Derogatory profiles of the two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak, are hosted on an online private portal for pesticide company employees and a range of influential allies. [These] efforts were spearheaded by a "reputation management" firm ... called v-Fluence. The company then launched a platform called Bonus Eventus, named after the Roman god of agriculture whose name translates to "good outcome". Bonus Eventus is invite-only and counts more than 1,000 members. They include executives from the world's largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, as well as academics, government officials and high-profile policymakers. The individuals profiled in the portal include more than 500 environmental advocates, scientists, politicians and others seen as opponents of pesticides and GM crops. Many profiles include personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values. The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars – to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking. More than 30 current government officials are on the membership list, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture.

Note: Read about how pesticide companies dominate Google News searches. For more along these lines, explore summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

A federal court in California ruled late Tuesday against the Environmental Protection Agency, ordering officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply. The ruling by District Court Judge Edward Chen ... deals a blow to public health groups in the growing debate about whether the benefits of continuing to add fluoride to the water supply outweighs its risks. While Chen was careful to say that his ruling "does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health," he said that evidence of its potential risk was now enough to warrant forcing the EPA to take action. "In all, there is substantial and scientifically credible evidence establishing that fluoride poses a risk to human health; it is associated with a reduction in the IQ of children and is hazardous at dosages that are far too close to fluoride levels in the drinking water of the United States," the judge wrote in his ruling. The judge's ruling cites a review by the National Institutes of Health's toxicology program finalized last month, which concluded that "higher levels" of fluoride is now linked to lowered IQ in children. Chen said he left it up to the EPA which of a number of options the agency could take in response to his ruling. They range from a warning label about fluoride's risks at current levels to taking steps towards tightening restrictions on its addition to drinking water.

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

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.