Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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.

Two lawsuits aim to stop US federal regulators and industry from "illegally" hiding basic information about toxic chemicals used in consumer products. Companies often claim that toxic chemicals' health and safety data, and even their names, are "confidential business information" (CBI) because making the data public could damage their bottom line. The US Environmental Protection Agency frequently allows industry to use the tactic, which makes it virtually impossible for public health researchers to quickly learn about dangerous chemicals. It also bars most EPA staff and state regulators from accessing the information and criminal charges could be brought against those who do. That leaves regulators attempting to protect the public without essential information for some chemicals and in effect creates a "shadow regulatory government" in the EPA, said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney who is now director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), a plaintiff in one of the suits. The ... suit alleges the EPA has narrowed Congress's definitions of what should be made public. The EPA is also withholding chemical safety test results that show health risks to the public or environment. Separately, Peer is suing the EPA for hiding health and safety data for chemicals made by Inhance Technologies, which produces plastic containers found to leach dangerous levels of PFOA, a highly toxic compound, into the containers' contents.

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

After House Democrats released a scrapbook gifted to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, questions have emerged about whether the late child-sex trafficker's proclivities were an open secret. Indeed, the so-called birthday book, which was compiled by Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, contains multiple letters that are laden with sexual innuendo – including one alleged missive from Donald Trump. A mysterious message, typed on a naked female torso, quotes Trump as stating: "We have certain things in common, Jeffrey." Part of this birthday note implored that "every day be another wonderful secret". "Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?" a quote on the drawing attributed to Trump also stated. Trump is listed under the "friends" section of the book's table of contents, as are former president Bill Clinton and attorney Alan Dershowitz. Jean-Luc Brunel, a former model agency head suspected of supplying young girls to Epstein, was also included in the friends section. Maxwell introduced Brunel to Epstein in the 1980s. Brunel, who was arrested in 2020 by French authorities on suspicion of rape, was found hanged in prison while awaiting trial. Epstein died in jail pending trial six years ago. Several familiar with the 1980s and 1990s scene inhabited by moneyed men, such as Epstein, said that mistreatment of women and girls was well-known. [Model] CarrĂ© Otis ... said she did not meet Epstein but "definitely knew his name" from a whisper network among her colleagues.

Note: When undeniable evidence of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring came to court in 2008, the entire system moved to shield him and his associates from the gravity of his crimes. Major news outlets suppressed key evidence. Prosecutors shut down an FBI investigation and gave him a sweetheart deal. Alexander Acosta, the US attorney who signed off on the deal, later said he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence, and to leave it alone." Even after his conviction as a sex offender, Epstein was meeting with top officials at the CIA and the White House. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Bernadette Spofforth [was] detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime. Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she'd reposted on X another user's content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime – clarifying in her retweet, "If this is true." Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post – but it had already been seen thousands of times. The murders resulted in widespread civil unrest in the UK, where mass migration is a central issue for citizens. Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later. Spofforth, 56, a successful businesswoman from Chester, was placed under arrest. Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending "grossly offensive" messages or sharing content of an "indecent, obscene or menacing character." Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail–all over mean Facebook posts. On Tuesday, the US State Department's annual Human Rights Report slammed British authorities' "serious restrictions on freedom of expression."

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

The picture many people have of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is overwhelmingly positive. And yet there is now overwhelming evidence that governments have funded and in some cases created NGOs to demand politically-motivated, unconstitutional, and dangerously ideological censorship. Other journalists, researchers, and I have documented how government intelligence and security agencies have done this in the US, Europe, and Brazil. Those agencies work with existing or new NGOs to circumvent free speech protections, including the First Amendment, and legitimize what is politically and ideologically motivated as apolitical and non-ideological. This can accurately be described as "censorship-by-proxy." Censorship by proxy operates similarly in every nation. NGOs claiming to be independent of governments, but funded by, created by, and working with government agencies, demand censorship based on their "independent reports," "fact checks," and "analyses." Often, the NGO "fact checks" are themselves misinformation, including misrepresentations of opinions as facts. Twitter and Facebook created special "portals" for government-funded NGOs to "flag" posts they wanted censored. The NGOs, staffed with ostensibly former military and intelligence employees, sought and won mass censorship with an aim at promoting the narratives they wanted and stomping out narratives they didn't want.

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

In May, prosecutors in Seattle charged a sheriff's deputy with raping a 17-year-old girl. The deputy met the teenager while he was an adviser in his department's youth mentorship program known as Explorers. Law enforcement departments across the country have Explorer programs – overseen by Scouting America, formerly known as Boy Scouts of America – and they have a history of sexual abuse and misconduct. Ride-alongs, in which young people accompany officers on their patrol shifts, are a key perk of the Explorers program. They are also a gateway to abuse. The Marshall Project examined hundreds of abuse allegations in law enforcement Explorer programs and found that about a quarter of them involved officers on ride-alongs with teens – some as young as 14 years old. The Marshall Project reviewed ... the 217 cases currently in our database. The review found that at least a third of the cases involved alleged abuses in an officer's vehicle. More specifically, about a quarter of the cases involved officers grooming, harassing, or sexually assaulting young people during Explorer ride-alongs. A 2003 report by the University of Nebraska at Omaha found that more than 40% of the cases of officers abusing teenage girls that researchers identified nationwide involved police Explorer programs. "And it's just like other types of police crime, we don't see a whole lot of changes as a result of police reforms," [said criminologist Philip Stinson].

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Children highly exposed to an insecticide prior to birth showed signs of impaired brain development and motor function, according to a new study of chlorpyrifos – a pesticide still used on US crops despite decades of warnings about its impact on children's health. The study ... is the first to tie prenatal exposure to the pesticide to "enduring and widespread molecular, cellular, and metabolic effects in the brain," the authors wrote. The study ... comes months after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its plans to partially ban chlorpyrifos but allow continued use on 11 crops. The EPA ... banned chlorpyrifos in 2021 after a federal court ordered the agency to take action amid litigation and a wealth of evidence of the risks it poses to children. But the agency reversed course again after a different federal court sided with farm groups in opposition. MRI scans showed that kids with the highest levels of exposure were more likely to have reduced blood flow to the brain, thickening of the brain cortex, abnormal brain pathways, impaired nerve insulation and other problems. Chlorpyrifos was the 11th most frequently found pesticide in food samples in the most recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pesticide residue monitoring report, and a 2023 US Department of Agriculture pesticide residue report found traces of the chemical in baby food made with pears, as well as in samples of blackberries, celery and tomatoes.

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

The transparency of donations to the World Health Organization (WHO) Foundation–an independent body that seeks funds from across industry, civil society and governments, and awards grants to the WHO – has plummeted over its first 3 years of operations, a new analysis has found. The analysis found that the majority of donors are not publicly disclosed, including some unnamed gifts as big as $11 million, which raises concerns about the potential "level of outside influence and role of commercial interests in setting WHO priorities," the researchers wrote. In 2020, the foundation was set up to solicit funds from a wider range of donors than the WHO can directly accept, including wealthy individuals and corporations. Some academics and civil society organizations are concerned that accepting donations from industry, such as businesses selling alcohol and infant formula, poses a conflict of interest. Evidence suggests that some companies use donations "as opportunities to distract or reframe product harms.., and assist wider lobbying efforts against public health regulation," wrote the authors of the new analysis. Using a scale to judge transparency in donations developed by Open Democracy, an independent international media platform, the researchers gave the WHO Foundation a D grade. This grade is for organizations that only name a minority of funders and not in a systematic way, putting it on par with some ‘dark money' think tanks.

Note: Concerns about WHO's growing dependence on opaque funding are not abstract. Past investigations show how Purdue Pharma influenced WHO opioid guidelines to expand sales globally and how Coca-Cola–linked consultants shaped WHO's aspartame reviews. Bill Gates' hundreds of millions to WHO now give him outsized influence to prioritize corporate interests under the guise of public health philanthropy, which have led to mass suicides in India, worsening environmental degradation and poverty in Africa, and increasing corporate control over the media.

You are a fisherman. Suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you. That is what happened to a group of unnamed North Korean fishermen who accidentally stumbled upon a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs in 2019. The commandos had set out to install a surveillance device to wiretap government communications in North Korea. When they stumbled upon an unexpected group of divers on a boat, the SEALs killed everyone on board and retreated. The U.S. government concluded that the victims were "civilians diving for shellfish." Officials didn't even know how many, telling the [New York] Times that it was "two or three people," even though the SEALs had searched the boat and disposed of the bodies. The mission wasn't just an intelligence failure. It was a failure that killed real people. The U.S. government "often" hides the failures of special operations from policymakers. Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, roughly estimates that Joint Special Operations Command killed 100,000 people during the Iraq War "surge" from 2007 to 2009. The secrecy around America's spying-and-assassination complex makes it impossible to know how many of those people were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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

A long-suppressed oversight report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) concluded that the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump, had been manipulated under the direction of then-CIA Director John Brennan. The HPSCI report revealed that Brennan created a special Fusion Cell, excluded independent reviewers, and used a tightly controlled team of hand-picked CIA analysts to reverse what the underlying intelligence actually said. According to a CIA whistleblower who co-authored the ICA, Brennan put the team "under duress" to reach a conclusion that Putin supported Trump. The evidence did not show that the Russians favored Trump. According to someone close to the report, the raw intelligence showed that Russian officials saw Hillary Clinton as "more stable and more manageable" – and thus preferable to Trump. But Brennan's hand-picked team reversed that. Meanwhile, those responsible have faced no consequences. There was a time when if you abused your power in office, whether or not it rose to the level of a crime, you were exiled from D.C. Instead, Comey gets a teaching job in ethics, and Clapper and Brennan get TV contracts. The picture is less incomplete and, finally, clear. The Intelligence Community did not merely misread Russian intentions. It reversed its own analysts. It misled Congress.

Note: The security firm CrowdStrike was hired to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in 2016 and found no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated. All they found was inconclusive circumstantial evidence, which was presented as proof in media to the public. This deflected from the DNC and Clinton campaign's sabotage of Bernie Sanders and the damaging content of leaked DNC emails. In 2022, the DNC and Clinton campaign were fined by the FEC for obscuring their role in funding the debunked Steele dossier. Clinton also personally approved sharing another unverified claim with the press that alleged a secret Trump-Russia server connection, which helped trigger an FBI investigation later found to be baseless. Why are we not connecting the dots?

Digital technology was sold as a liberating tool that could free individuals from state power. Yet the state security apparatus always had a different view. The Prism leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed a deep and almost unconditional cooperation between Silicon Valley firms and security apparatuses of the state such as the National Security Agency (NSA). People realized that basically any message exchanged via Big Tech firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. could be easily spied upon with direct backdoor access: a form of mass surveillance with few precedents ... especially in nominally democratic states. The leaks prompted outrage, but eventually most people preferred to look away. The most extreme case is the surveillance and intelligence firm Palantir. Its service is fundamentally to provide a more sophisticated version of the mass surveillance that the Snowden leaks revealed. In particular, it endeavors to support the military and police as they aim to identify and track various targets – sometimes literal human targets. Palantir is a company whose very business is to support the security state in its most brutal manifestations: in military operations that lead to massive loss of life, including of civilians, and in brutal immigration enforcement [in] the United States. Unfortunately, Palantir is but one part of a much broader military-information complex, which is becoming the axis of the new Big Tech Deep State.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the intelligence community and in Big Tech.

It's no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans. The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign ("real or simulated") and blaming it on Cuban refugees. In the summer of 2014, the CIA's inspector general concluded that the CIA had "improperly" spied on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency's black history of torture. CIA officers ... also sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information. In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack.

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

AI's promise of behavior prediction and control fuels a vicious cycle of surveillance which inevitably triggers abuses of power. The problem with using data to make predictions is that the process can be used as a weapon against society, threatening democratic values. As the lines between private and public data are blurred in modern society, many won't realize that their private lives are becoming data points used to make decisions about them. What AI does is make this a surveillance ratchet, a device that only goes in one direction, which goes something like this: To make the inferences I want to make to learn more about you, I must collect more data on you. For my AI tools to run, I need data about a lot of you. And once I've collected this data, I can monetize it by selling it to others who want to use AI to make other inferences about you. AI creates a demand for data but also becomes the result of collecting data. What makes AI prediction both powerful and lucrative is being able to control what happens next. If a bank can claim to predict what people will do with a loan, it can use that to decide whether they should get one. If an admissions officer can claim to predict how students will perform in college, they can use that to decide which students to admit. Amazon's Echo devices have been subject to warrants for the audio recordings made by the device inside our homes–recordings that were made even when the people present weren't talking directly to the device. The desire to surveil is bipartisan. It's about power, not party politics.

Note: As journalist Kenan Malik put it, "It is not AI but our blindness to the way human societies are already deploying machine intelligence for political ends that should most worry us." Read about the shadowy companies tracking and trading your personal data, which isn't just used to sell products. It's often accessed by governments, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, often without warrants or oversight. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI.

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force" composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post. The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and be stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively. Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump has summoned the military for domestic purposes like few of his predecessors have. He did so most recently Monday, authorizing the mobilization of 800 D.C. National Guard troops to bolster enhanced law enforcement activity in Washington. The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this "is really strange because essentially nothing is happening," she said.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

What began as a fairly small protest against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at an apparel manufacturer in the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles on June 6, led to an immediate response by federal agents in riot gear. [On June 7], President Donald Trump ... called in the National Guard. The deployment of troops in Los Angeles is the brutal culmination of a yearslong campaign to systematically erode and circumscribe public assembly rights, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans at all levels of government. Political scientists call this "democratic backsliding": the gradual erosion of basic rights, civil liberties, and other political institutions that allow the public to hold the government to account. This war on dissent is the most visible sign of democratic backsliding in the U.S. By using the National Guard to silence dissent in Los Angeles, the Trump administration is eroding a core pillar of democracy: the right to assemble in public to express opinions contrary to government action and to advocate for change. U.S. police forces developed [an] approach to public order policing called "negotiated management" in the 1980 and 1990s. Under negotiated management, police tried to respect the right of public assembly. However, in response to the anti-globalization protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle ... police shifted to a new set of tactics called "strategic incapacitation" that would provide them with more control.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

Was George Floyd killed by a police officer? The official answer, according to a newly revealed set of federal government records, is no. Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, anyone who dies in law enforcement custody, like during an arrest, must be reported to the Department of Justice. If the death resulted from police use of force, as Floyd's did, it is labeled "use of force by a law enforcement or corrections officer." But, when an unredacted copy of four years of data was inadvertently posted on a government website late last year, Floyd's case was listed under a different category, "homicide" – which refers to deaths at the hands of another civilian, not law enforcement. The error shows how even one of the most notorious cases of police violence, one that led to a murder conviction for the officer, can be hidden in the official statistics. A Marshall Project review ... identified hundreds of people who died in custody but weren't listed, and entire states that failed to report almost any deaths in their prisons or in their jails. We found at least 681 deaths missing from the federal count – a number that would almost certainly rise if more complete data were available nationwide. More than 5,000 people likely died in state and federal prisons in 2021, over 1,000 in local jails in 2019 and over 1,000 in arrest-related interactions with police in 2024. The actual toll is unknown because no one, including the federal government, bothers keeping track.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in policing and in the prison system.

Each year, about 6,000 people die in prisons and jails, and another 2,000 during encounters with police, according to estimates by government agencies and nonprofit groups – numbers that experts believe are likely undercounts. Federal law has for 25 years required local agencies to report in-custody deaths, but the mandate is not enforced. In many places, there's no reliable public accounting of what happened or why. Families who lose loved ones in custody are often met with silence or conflicting accounts. The authorities tasked with finding the truth – from jail officials to medical examiners to state investigators – often operate slowly, without coordination, or behind closed doors. Late last year, the Justice Department published aggregated totals of deaths reported between 2019 and 2023. Due to a technical glitch, The Marshall Project was able to download the full dataset – a loophole that was quickly closed. (The department has not published unredacted death in custody datasets in the past because of privacy issues and concerns about data quality.) The records we reviewed showed widespread gaps: missing causes of death, vague entries and inconsistent details from jail to jail. Those gaps make it nearly impossible to hold institutions accountable, experts say. "You can't have that discussion without the data," said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and one of the law's original authors. "That's why we passed the law."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in policing and in the prison system.

In women's prisons across Texas, tear gas–which includes agents such as pepper spray–has become the go-to response for minor infractions. Guards deploy it at close range in enclosed spaces, against policy, against humanity. They gas entire housing units to punish one person's "noncompliance." What they don't tell you is how this chemical weapon–which is banned in warfare ... affects women's bodies differently than men's. Studies have found that women experience more serious reactions to tear gas exposure, particularly impacting reproductive health. In 2021, a study on the effects of tear gas on reproductive health found that nearly 900 people reported abnormal menstrual changes after exposure to tear gas. Other studies have linked tear gas exposure to miscarriage and fetal harm. Criminal justice advocates have decried the growing use of tear gas and pepper spray in prisons, saying that they should only be used as a last resort when there's a serious threat to safety. But I've seen guards deploy it for cursing, for walking too slowly, for asking too many questions. It's not about safety; it's about control, about breaking our spirits through chemical warfare. The solution isn't better ventilation or more careful deployment, though both would help. The solution is recognizing that the use of chemical weapons against the incarcerated–many of whom are trauma survivors–is inherently sadistic and unnecessary. Tear gas is even used in Texas juvenile facilities.

Note: This article was written by Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist from Detroit. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and non-lethal weapons.

Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric ... private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history. The industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities. Private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention. Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

Staff at a Santa Barbara county jail heard screams coming from one of the cells. A 57-year-old inmate was moaning and hyperventilating. Rather than sending her to the ER, medical staff chalked her pain up to opioid withdrawal, since they had taken a prescription opioid away upon her arrival days before, a grand jury investigation later found. They placed the inmate – referred to as CF in the grand jury's report – on mental health observation. The grand jury determined that CF's stomach had perforated days before her excruciating death. CF would have had a 90% chance of survival if she had received immediate treatment. Wellpath, one of the nation's leading health providers to prisons and jails, was the contractor responsible for healthcare at Santa Barbara county's Northern Branch jail, where CF died. The grand jury's report is the latest in over a decade of government investigations into two behemoths in the prison health industry – Wellpath and Corizon – which are both backed by private equity investors. Both Corizon and Wellpath continued to contract with jails, prisons, immigration and juvenile detention centers around the country until they faced so much liability ... that both landed in bankruptcy court over the last two years. Both companies were still operating in some form while restructuring in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and had reorganization plans confirmed in bankruptcy court this year that allowed them to ... continue their prison contracts.

Note: According to this Guardian article, "More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the financial system.

A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts [in Africa]. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up. Fatalities from militant Islamist violence spiked over the years of America's most vigorous counterterrorism efforts on the continent, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement – Somalia and the West African Sahel – suffering the worst outcomes. "Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade," reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. "What many people don't know is that the United States' post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis," [said] Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. In 2002 and 2003 ... the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks, resulting in a combined 23 casualties across the entire continent. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance were key leaders in a dozen coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel.

Note: Read more about the Pentagon's recent military failures in Africa. Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

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.