Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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In early 2018, former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander worked out a deal with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the cyber institute led by one of his closest aides, Saud al-Qahtani, to help the Saudi ruler train the next generation of Saudi hackers. The agreement between IronNet, founded by Alexander, and the cyber school ... faced no scrutiny for its association with Qahtani, after the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi he reportedly orchestrated just a few months later. Alexander officially inked the deal with the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Advanced Technologies – a school set up to train Saudi cyber intelligence agents – at a signing ceremony in Washington, D.C.. Saudi Arabia's agreement with IronNet was part of a host of moves to step up its cyber capabilities, coinciding with a campaign against the kingdom's critics abroad. Khashoggi, then a Washington Post columnist and prominent Salman critic, received a series of threatening messages, including one from Qahtani, warning him to remain silent. Khashoggi, whose family and close associates discovered listening malware electronically implanted on their smartphones, was then lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. It was there that a team dispatched by Qahtani detained and tortured the Saudi government critic. Qahtani, according to reports, beamed in through Skype to insult Khashoggi during the ordeal. Khashoggi was then dismembered with a bone saw.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
In 2018, senior executives at one of the country's largest nonprofit hospital chains, Providence, were frustrated. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars providing free health care to patients. It was eating into their bottom line. The executives, led by Providence's chief financial officer at the time, devised a solution: a program called Rev-Up. Rev-Up provided Providence's employees with a detailed playbook for wringing money out of patients – even those who were supposed to receive free care because of their low incomes, a New York Times investigation found. If patients did not pay, Providence sent debt collectors to pursue them. More than half the nation's roughly 5,000 hospitals are nonprofits like Providence. They enjoy lucrative tax exemptions; Providence avoids more than $1 billion a year in taxes. In exchange, the Internal Revenue Service requires them to provide services, such as free care for the poor, that benefit the communities in which they operate. But in recent decades, many of the hospitals have become virtually indistinguishable from for-profit companies, adopting an unrelenting focus on the bottom line and straying from their traditional charitable missions. And, as Providence illustrates, some hospital systems have not only reduced their emphasis on providing free care to the poor but also developed elaborate systems to convert needy patients into sources of revenue. The result ... is that thousands of poor patients were saddled with debts that they never should have owed.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and health from reliable major media sources.
Last year, Michel Goldman, a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe's best-known champions of medical research, walked into a clinic near his house, rolled up his sleeve, and had a booster shot delivered to his arm. Michel was having night sweats, and he could feel swollen lymph nodes in his neck. It was cancer of the immune system–lymphoma. Michel understood this meant he'd soon be immunocompromised by chemotherapy. He had just a narrow window of opportunity in which his body would respond in full to COVID vaccination. Having received two doses of Pfizer the prior spring, Michel quickly went to get his third. Within a few days, though, Michel was somehow feeling even worse. His night sweats got much more intense, and he found himself–quite out of character–taking afternoon naps. Most worryingly, his lymph nodes were even more swollen than before. Scans ... showed a brand-new barrage of cancer lesions. It looked like someone had set off fireworks inside Michel's body. More than that, the lesions were now prominent on both sides of the body, with new clusters blooming in Michel's right armpit in particular, and along the right side of his neck. When Michel's hematologist saw the scan, she told him to report directly to the nearest hospital pharmacy. He'd have to start on steroid pills right away. Such a swift progression for lymphoma in just three weeks was highly unusual. As he followed these instructions, Michel felt a gnawing worry that his COVID booster shot had somehow made him sicker.
Note: A study of this case was published in Frontiers in Medicine. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
The Justice Department is failing to adequately and efficiently collect data about deaths in state prisons and local jails, with at least 990 incidents going uncounted by the federal government in fiscal year 2021 alone, according to a newly released bipartisan Senate report. The report's findings were the focus of a hearing ... which took the federal Bureau of Prisons and then-Director Michael Carvajal to task this summer over accusations of unsanitary and unsafe conditions at a penitentiary in Atlanta and other allegations of misconduct across the federal prison system. Now, the conclusion of a 10-month investigation into how the Justice Department oversees the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act accuses the agency of missing death counts that are readily available on public websites and in arrest-related databases. The law requires that states and federal agencies report in-custody death information to the attorney general. The information was due at the end of 2016, but the Senate report says it won't be completed until 2024. "DOJ's failure to implement DCRA has deprived Congress and the American public of information about who is dying in custody and why," the report says. "This information is critical to improve transparency in prisons and jails, identifying trends in custodial deaths that may warrant corrective action – such as failure to provide adequate medical care, mental health services, or safeguard prisoners from violence – and identifying specific facilities with outlying death rates."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the prison system from reliable major media sources.
The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Some [takedowns] involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives. One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website. In 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md.. The pseudo profiles ... were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the "information environment" to defend the United States. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychological operations.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
During its summer meeting over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee quietly amended its bylaws, giving the narrower body power to override decisions made by its members at its quadrennial convention. The national committee approved language requiring that it must ratify any bylaw amendments that the convention, a broader body, wants to adopt. "No such Bylaw or amendment shall be effective unless and until it is subsequently ratified by a vote of the majority of the entire membership of the Democratic National Committee," the amended measure from the Rules and Bylaws Committee states. "These decisions are made to move ultimate power from the members of the convention into the hands of the committee, and that can become a dangerous precedent," Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer [said]. "These seem to us as increasingly anti-democratic decisions." The amendment removes the authority over DNC decisions from the national convention, which includes thousands of members, and places it instead with the smaller national committee of just under 500. Democratic National Committee Member Jessica Chambers ... called the DNC "the least democratic organization that I'm involved with," in part because paid staff whip votes against members. The recent attempt to suppress dissent is an example of how committee staff undermine elected members "for someone else's agenda," she added. "And I don't know whose agenda it really is."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on elections corruption from reliable major media sources.
Where community activists, use-of-force victims and city officials have failed to persuade police departments to change dangerous and sometimes deadly policing practices, insurers are successfully dictating changes to tactics and policies. The movement is driven by the increasingly large jury awards and settlements that cities and their insurers are paying in police use-of-force cases, especially since the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Those cases led to settlements of $12 million and $27 million, respectively. Insurance companies are passing the costs – and potential future costs – on to their law enforcement clients. Larger law enforcement agencies – like the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department or the New York Police Department – handle it in different ways, often by creating a special fund to finance settlements or by paying those costs from the county's or city's general fund. This insulates them from external demands by insurers. Departments with a long history of large civil rights settlements have seen their insurance rates shoot up by 200 to 400 percent over the past three years, according to insurance industry and police experts. Even departments with few problems are experiencing rate increases of 30 to 100 percent. Now, insurers also are telling departments that they must change the way they police. A Post investigation in March documented more than $3.2 billion spent over the past decade to resolve nearly 40,000 claims at 25 of the nation's largest police and sheriff's departments.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption from reliable major media sources.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, his spouse and two adult children are giving away their ownership in the apparel maker he started some 50 years ago, dedicating all profits from the company to projects and organizations that will protect wild land and biodiversity and fight the climate crisis. The company is worth about $3 billion. In a letter about the decision, published on the Patagonia website on Wednesday, Choiunard wrote of "reimagining capitalism," and said: "While we're doing our best to address the environmental crisis, it's not enough. We needed to find a way to put more money into fighting the crisis while keeping the company's values intact. One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn't be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed. Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility. Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own." The privately held company's stock will now be owned by a climate-focused trust and group of nonprofit organizations, called the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective respectively, the company said in a statement, noting "every dollar that is not reinvested back into Patagonia will be distributed as dividends to protect the planet."
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
The British government targeted the American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael and sought to weaken the Black Power movement with covert disinformation campaigns, recently declassified documents have revealed. The effort was the work of a secret unit known as the Information Research Department, based in London and part of the Foreign Office, which created and distributed literature from fake sources as part of a broader effort to destabilise cold war enemies. The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent. Based mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials. The IRD was particularly worried by the movement's potential influence in the Caribbean. In 1969, the IRD also created a new fake group: The Organisation of African Students for African Power. This was supposedly based in East Germany and adopted contemporary radical New Left ideas, "proclaiming a plague on both" the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc. The IRD felt this provided a better platform to "damage opponents" than the dated nationalist approach, while being difficult to trace back to Britain because many similar groups had genuinely sprung up in the late 1960s.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
The environmental benefits of using electricity rather than fossil fuels to power our world goes without saying– however, the process of electrifying everything has its obstacles. Many in the tech world are excited about the new A1-S battery ... declaring that "MIT has produced yet another breakthrough technology that is set to change the world for the better." Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently innovated batteries that are made of cost-effective and abundant materials. Instead of using lithium, [MIT Professor Donald] Sadoway and the team ... selected aluminum for one electrode, which he asserted is "the most abundant metal on Earth… no different from the foil at the supermarket." He combined the aluminum with ... sulfur, which he said is "often a waste product from processes such as petroleum refining." Both the charging and discharging cycles generate enough heat that the battery can heat itself and doesn't require an external source. On top of being a fraction of the price of conventional batteries, they can also be charged very quickly with no risk of forming dendrites. It's important to note that this new battery isn't without problems. For instance, the process of extracting alumina out of bauxite is not the easiest or cleanest, and ... researchers are concerned that we may one day run out of [sulfur]. That said, Sadoway made it clear that these issues don't compare to the problems that come with sourcing ingredients for lithium-ion batteries.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles.
The FBI spent years surveilling the "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin, trying to gauge how involved she was with the civil rights movement, communism and the Black Power movement, a 270-page document shows. Franklin, who died in 2018, was monitored ahead of several performances and attendances she made for civil rights groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose first president was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Informants mentioned Franklin, a Detroit native, in separate memos for possibly appearing at the SCLC's 1967 and 1968 national conventions, in Atlanta and Memphis, respectively. The FBI mailed several copies of "The Atlanta Voice" newspaper, which reported on her visit to town, to FBI offices around the country, as well as the U.S. attorney general and the Secret Service. During this time, Franklin was, in fact, actively involved in the civil rights movement through her music and personal connections. She was identified in a 1969 memo titled "Possible Racial Violence, Urban Areas, Racial Matters" when, in the year before, Denver concertgoers rioted after she refused to perform at the Red Rocks amphitheater due to not being properly paid. In 1971, memos named the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles and the Boston Young Workers Liberation League as organizations who intended to book her for rallies.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
Russia's war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world. But while disastrous for the global poor ... the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants. "The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022," Bloomberg reported Friday. "The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis," Bloomberg added. "Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley." "People's misery makes capitalists' superprofit," Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies. The World Food Program estimates that "as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night" and ... "those facing acute food insecurity has soared–from 135 million to 345 million–since 2019." "It's too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there's a supply and demand reason for these prices going up," [Michael] Greenberger added. "My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise news summaries revealing banking corruption from reliable major media sources. You can also visit our Banking Information Center to further explore corruption in the financial industry.
A Malaysian businessman at the heart of the worst scandal to hit the US Navy in modern times has escaped house arrest, the US Marshals Service has said. Leonard Glenn Francis, known as "Fat Leonard", cut his ankle bracelet off before disappearing from his home in San Diego, California. His escape comes three weeks before he was due for sentencing after pleading guilty in 2015 to bribing senior US Navy officers. Francis had been the key figure behind a sprawling multi-million dollar bribery scheme that he operated by way of his Singapore-based company which serviced the US Navy's Pacific fleet. The US justice department describes it as a colossal fraud that cost the navy tens of millions of dollars. Francis ... used his influence with senior commanders to secure lucrative military contracts often involving the Indo-Pacific based 7th Fleet - the largest of the Navy's forward deployed fleets. Prosecutors say he overcharged the navy to the tune of $35m (Ł30m) and plied navy officers with cash, gourmet meals, expensive cigars, rare liquor and wild sex parties in upscale hotels to procure the contracts. Arrested in 2013 he pled guilty in 2015 to offering $500,000 in bribes to US Navy officers in an attempt to funnel official work towards his shipyards. Dozens of navy officials have been ensnared in the case, with four officers having been found guilty, and 28 others, including contractors and naval officials, having pleaded guilty so far. Francis [was] placed under house arrest while acting as a co-operating witness.
Note: At one point, Francis bribed officials to redirect an aircraft carrier. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in learning more about psychedelics, especially how they might help me with depression and anxiety. That's a broad category of plant medicines including psilocybin ("magic") mushrooms, MDMA (ecstasy), DMT (Dimitri or the Businessman's Trip), ketamine ("special K") and some others. My friend told me he'd recently taken his first "trip," which he described as life-changing. I asked him – a real estate developer living in Northern California, married with kids – why he decided to try a psychedelic substance. "My work felt increasingly stale and meaningless," he explained to me over a beer. "Despite a massive amount of reflection and coaching around how to break the rut, I felt as though I was still off track." When I confided my interest in psychedelics to a few other friends, several said they had tried the drugs and experienced several benefits: from easing anxiety to finding spiritual insights to combating depression and, among some with cancer, helping to reduce the fear of dying. They are hardly outliers. According to a new YouGovAmerica study, "one in four Americans say they've tried at least one psychedelic drug," amounting to some 72 million U.S. adults. When I queried my psychiatrist about participating to help improve my mental health, he was supportive, with two caveats: Do it with a trained therapist or guide, and do your best to ensure that the substance is what it's said to be.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences. Their extreme wealth and privilege ... make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. What, if anything, could we do to resist it? A former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia ... JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now. JC's real passion wasn't just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. Investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
Note: Read about a Cold War U.S. government missile silo that was transformed into a luxury bunker to prepare for the apocalypse in this previously reported news article. You might also consider exploring revealing news articles on food system corruption impacting our economy and environment.
The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy. We know how important these issues are because our ruling class works overtime to prevent them from being seriously discussed. We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. Wages ... are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago. When I was a kid growing up, most families were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Now an overwhelming majority of households need two paychecks to survive. Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful. During this terrible pandemic ... some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2tn richer. Just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20tn and are the major stockholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.
Note: The above was written by Sen. Bernie Sanders. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.
In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, Calif., and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and Ms. Alexander was having a hard day. A barista working at the Starbucks inside the Target was too. The espresso machine had broken down and she was clearly stressed. Ms. Alexander – who'd stopped crying and gone inside for some caffeine – smiled, ordered an iced green tea, and told her to hang in there. After picking up her order, she noticed a message on the cup: "Erin," the barista had scrawled next to a heart, "your soul is golden." The warmth of that small and unexpected gesture, from a stranger ... moved her deeply. New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, corroborate just how powerful experiences like Ms. Alexander's can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often. "People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little, maybe it's relatively inconsequential," [study co-author Amit] Kumar said. "But recipients are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them." What skills and talents do you already have? And how can you turn that into an offering for other people?"
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
National test results showed ... the pandemic's devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. Since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s ... scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop – three points in math – students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact. The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on. "The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids," [said Susanna Loeb at Brown University]. Being so far behind, she said, could lead to disengagement in school, making it less likely that they graduate from high school or attend college. The federal government has budgeted $122 billion to help students recover, the largest single investment in American schools, and at least 20 percent of that money must be spent on academic catch-up. Yet some schools have had difficulty hiring teachers, let alone tutors, and others may need to spend far more than 20 percent of their money to close big gaps.
Note: This article fails to mention that it was not the pandemic, but rather the lockdown policies that caused this debacle. Sweden, which never closed it's elementary schools, did not have this problem. Read more about the challenging impacts of lockdown policies in an essay written by a caring school teacher who presents solid evidence that the lockdowns in the U.S. and worldwide had tragic effects not only on low-income and homeless children, but on huge numbers of people around the world.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) tried to persuade its British counterpart to stop the Guardian publishing revelations about secret mass data collection from the NSA contractor, Edward Snowden. Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) ... rebuffed the suggestion that his agency should act as a censor on behalf of its US partner in electronic spying. British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks ... caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition [according to] a new book ... by Richard Kerbaj. Kerbaj reports that the US-UK intelligence relationship was further strained when the head of the NSA, Gen Keith Alexander, failed to inform Lobban that the Americans had identified Snowden ... leaving the British agency investigating its own ranks in the search for the leaker. The Five Eyes allies were outraged that a contractor like Snowden, working as a computer systems administrator, could get access to their secrets, and that because of US government outsourcing, there were 1.5 million Americans with top security clearance like Snowden. Allies were not prepared to challenge the Americans out of anxiety that they could be cut off from the flow of intelligence. British officials also decided to bite their tongues ... because of the value of the intelligence and funding provided by the NSA. Sir Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser, is quoted ... saying: "The US give us more than we give them so we just have to basically get on with it."
Note: Read more on how US and UK spy agencies undermine privacy and security in this news article reported by The Guardian. For a guide from The Guardian on how to remain secure against NSA surveillance, click here.
Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases. Providing prescriptions for fruit and vegetables can spur people to eat better and manage weight and blood sugar. The idea is for health care systems or insurers to provide or pay for healthy groceries, combined with nutrition education, to help patients change their eating habits. [Nancy] Brown says federal food assistance programs have helped to address hunger. "However, many U.S. food policies and programs focus on improving access to sufficient quantities of food," she says. Instead, it's time to modernize these policies and focus on the quality of food. The Affordable Care Act mandates that diet counseling be covered by insurers as a preventive care benefit for those at higher risk of chronic disease. Too often ... doctors prescribe drugs for conditions before recommending or trying lifestyle changes. The task force recommends that Congress create a Farmer Corps to support new farmers, building on the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program. "What we need to sustain agriculture is to incentivize restoring healthy soils and train more farmers to be successful doing that," [David Montgomery at University of Washington] says.
Note: For more information on general health and well-being, check out our Health Information Center. To further explore diet-related concerns, consider reading news articles on food corruption to understand how unhealthy diets may also be impacted by the politics of industrial agriculture, leading to contaminants and loss of nutrients in our food.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing 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.