Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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.
There are all kinds of enormous, impressive and, frankly, noisy machines at work across the 20,000 square meters of industrial warehouses at the headquarters of Fagor Arrasate, a manufacturing company in Spain's northern Basque Country. Fagor Arrasate belongs to the larger MondragĂłn Corporation, which in 2025 had a revenue of â‚Ź11.3 billion ($12.8 billion U.S.) and aggregate profits of more than â‚Ź600 million. Founded by five coworkers in 1956 as a small stove factory, MondragĂłn Corporation is today the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world. It employs more than 70,000 workers across 92 cooperatives ... making it the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Its grocery-store chain, Eroski, has hundreds of outlets across the nation; the MondragĂłn University offers college degrees; it includes Spain's ... largest producer of bicycles; and according to MondragĂłn's estimates, more than a third of Europe's solar panels use its tech and 60 percent of the world's trains contain its parts. The group, despite being owned by its workers ... is capitalist. Yet MondragĂłn's model has social good and humanism – rather than profit-maximizing – at its heart. The base salary for a MondragĂłn worker is on average 40 percent higher than Spain's minimum wage. On top of that, company profits are shared. From annual earnings, 60 percent is reinvested in the business, 30 percent goes to employees (as capital that can only be claimed once they retire or leave the group), and 10 percent is invested in the local community. In 2025, MondragĂłn allocated more than â‚Ź49 million for projects spanning social inclusion, poverty reduction, education, culture, sports, preservation of the Basque language and environmental sustainability. While cooperative governance may slow business decision-making, studies have found that cooperatives can make as much profit as companies under conventional systems.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy.
A former adviser to infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic. David Morens, who had worked under Fauci as a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) during the pandemic, entered his plea, to a conspiracy charge during a hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. The 78-year-old had been indicted in April on charges related to what prosecutors said was a scheme to thwart public records requests received by the agency beginning in April 2020 related to Covid-19 research grants. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on 12 November. The plea came after Fauci, who led the Niaid for 38 years and became the face of the US pandemic response, appeared before a Senate panel last month and repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination. The FBI said in 2023 that a leak from a Wuhan laboratory likely caused the pandemic, a claim China said had "no credibility whatsoever". The CIA said in January 2025 a lab leak was likely, but with "low confidence", while four other US intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe the virus most likely emerged via natural transmission from some animal. Prosecutors said that Morens pledged to ... counter the narrative Covid-19 leaked from a lab.
Note: In our latest Substack, COVID Revisited: A Complete Guide to Pandemic Propaganda and the Search for Truth in a Divided World, we explore how many COVID-era policies and mandates didn't actually have a scientific basis, and failed to hold up in the face of real world evidence. We also emphasize the devastating public health costs of fear, division, and social isolation. Read more on how Fauci was "untruthful" to Congress about Wuhan lab virus research.
"Sport in Mind began with one simple intention: to help a friend who was unwell," [said founder] Neil Harris. "Today, having supported more than 60,000 people, I'm reminded every day of the power of sport." Founded in 2010, the charity runs free sport and physical activity sessions for people experiencing mental health problems, from walking and football to gardening, dance and movement. It creates welcoming spaces where sport is treated less as competition and more as a route back into routine, confidence and recovery. The Bluetits Chill Swimmers is a free, volunteer-led community built around cold water swimming. What began in Wales has grown into a global network of informal local groups, where people meet outdoors to swim, dip, chat and build confidence in the water. Its appeal is not endurance or elite sport, but the chance to spend time in nature. GoodGym turns exercise into practical community action. Its members run, walk or cycle to help local projects and isolated older people, whether that means clearing a garden, sorting donations at a food bank or helping someone with a task they can no longer manage alone. "GoodGym was founded on a simple idea that we could use being active to help people and strengthen communities, Ed Field, head of operations, said. "What we've seen is that the benefits go both ways and that the people participating feel healthier, more connected and more purposeful through helping others."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
Defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey [is] the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries. A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the "godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast". "If you're raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey," he said. "Luckey is the top tier." Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors. In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations. Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called "Golden Dome" anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn. Anduril says in Trump's first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon's trillion-dollar budget.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and warfare technology.
US Customs and Border Protection is seeking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants and others who have left the United States, and press them into paying the government money, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The work would cover Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, and potentially other countries. The documents, which cap the so-called Tracing and Payment Recovery Services program at $9 million over the next two years, call for "commercial data verification and physical observation services" to confirm where each person lives. As of July, the Department of Homeland Security, CBP's parent agency, says it has issued more than $84 billion in fines to immigrants it has accused of failing to depart the United States. Those fines run against people who are still in the country, at $998 a day for up to five years. Some have reached up to $1.8 million. Hasan Shafiqullah, the Legal Aid Society's immigration supervising attorney, says he's seen some third-party collection agencies add $500,000 in additional administrative fees on top of the US government's fees. Immigrants accused of failing to depart have had their tax returns seized, their wages garnished, and their credit scores ruined. DHS promises that it will forgive failure-to-depart fines if people self-deport using the CBP Home app. The waiver does not include a separate $5,130 fee Congress created last year for people ordered removed in absentia and later arrested by ICE.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
As associate professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at A&M University in Texas, explains, Turritopsis dohrnii has an incredible ability to cheat death. "Turritopsis is unique, because when faced with unfavourable conditions – and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it – when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn't die." Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die. But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again. The process is called "cellular transdifferentiation", Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it's dying and sinks to the bottom. Then – like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar – it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says. It's one of "nature's coolest tricks", says ... Raquel LĂłpez-AragĂłn. "When this jellyfish gets old or gets hurt, instead of just dying like most animals, it transforms itself back into a baby jellyfish and grows up all over again. It can do this as many times as it wants, which means theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button on its life."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on animal wonders.
The US Army is about to make a working laser weapon an official part of its arsenal. The Pentagon is poised to sign a contract to acquire and rapidly deploy what's called an Enduring High Energy Laser in and around bases across the world to defend them from drone attacks. It will mark the first time that the US military will have committed to equipping its forces with laser weapons in significant numbers. The US military, at this moment, has either deployed or is actively testing a half-dozen laser weapons systems. The deployments haven't all gone great. Four vehicles equipped with Raytheon air-defense lasers were yanked from the Middle East after poor reviews from soldiers. One laser, built by the defense contractor AeroVironment and positioned along the southern US border, accidentally zapped a party balloon in February, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to briefly close the airspace around El Paso, Texas. Once it was reopened, the laser shot down a Border Patrol drone by mistake. Despite such mishaps, the Army appears ready to go beyond the one-offs and the experiments. The Pentagon and its suppliers had been scrambling to field something, anything to defend against mass-produced, low-cost attack drones. They've rolled out radio frequency jammers, microwave weapons, an array of missiles, drones designed to kill other drones, even copies of the Iranian robots. None of them ... have been enough.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and warfare technology.
Officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another approached him with the same demand. Open your mouth. One officer tried to take his fingerprints and swab the inside of his cheek for DNA. He refused. Then another tried. Then a third. Each time, Moreno-Mendez refused. Four days later, Moreno-Mendez was charged with failing to register as a noncitizen and refusing to provide DNA while in federal custody–the latter a misdemeanor. On August 18, 2025, a magistrate judge in Waco found him guilty of each. Moreno-Mendez's case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations–a federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025. The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction. Yet once the DNA profiles of detained people enter the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
The world's biggest ultra-processed food corporations are hindering global efforts to tackle the obesity crisis by suing governments that try to promote healthier diets, the head of the World Health Organization has said. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, accused global food companies of obstructing the adoption of vital public health measures and costing countries billions of dollars in healthcare and legal costs in the process. Almost 1 billion people worldwide are living with obesity, and unhealthy diets are one of the main drivers of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption is soaring and now makes up half the average diet in many countries, including the UK, the US and Australia. Governments around the world, waking up to the health and economic impacts of the obesity crisis, have begun introducing measures designed to curb junk-food intake and promote healthier diets. These include front-of-pack warning labels, marketing and advertising restrictions on unhealthy products, and taxes on junk food. Publicly, the world's biggest UPF companies insist they back the policies. But an investigation ... found many of these same companies were taking governments to court to overturn, weaken or delay the policies. In total, 235 lawsuits were lodged over health policies targeting UPFs in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US and the UK from 2010 to 2025, the investigation found.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the food system and in the corporate world.
This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn't have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most. But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots–and anyone else within hundreds of miles–unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors. The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. "As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone," says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and warfare technology.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul, who has published Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary from when he led the nation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, says that the entries reveal a "level of dishonesty" that is "really astounding." "One of the biggest items that we found in there was that in January of 2020 he already was acknowledging that the virus didn't originate in the marketplace. For years he's been telling you – if you interviewed him last week, he's probably still telling you – the reason we think it came from nature is because they had these exotic animals and that's where SARS came from previously," Paul told reporters. "The earliest people who got COVID were not associated with the marketplace. The Chinese CDC was saying this in January of 2020. He knew it, he told dear diary, but to the public, he commissioned this paper called â€Proximal Origins,' and in it they go on and on saying it's implausible that it came from the lab and we're really convinced it came from these wild animals in the marketplace," Paul told reporters. Paul has accused Fauci of lying about gain-of-function research into dangerous viruses at the Chinese lab and subpoenaed the 85-year-old former health official to testify before his committee. Paul also said on social media that his investigation into Fauci shows that he "put protecting his reputation ahead of protecting the American people."
Note: As Washington Post reported, Fauci characterized the 6-ft recommendation as "an empiric decision that wasn't based on data" and testified: "It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance." In our latest Substack, COVID Revisited: A Complete Guide to Pandemic Propaganda and the Search for Truth in a Divided World, we explore how many COVID-era policies and mandates didn't actually have a scientific basis, and failed to hold up in the face of real world evidence. We also emphasize the devastating public health costs of fear, division, and social isolation. Read more on how Fauci was "untruthful" to Congress about Wuhan lab virus research.
Dozens of former students of the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where Jeffrey Epstein is said to have encountered some of his earliest victims, told a law firm hired by the school that they had been sexually abused by teachers, staff members, trustees and others affiliated with the institution in episodes ranging from the 1950s to the 2010s. In a report released on Tuesday, after almost two years of interviews, the law firm presented firsthand accounts of Interlochen alumni, who said they had been subjected to misconduct ranging from grooming and flirting to intercourse. The report said that some 70 of the former students described physical abuse and identified the perpetrators as 47 adults affiliated with the center. The report, which is 97 pages long, said that some of the adults figured in multiple accounts that stretched over decades, but that a majority of the episodes had occurred several decades ago and claims of abuse had dropped sharply since 2000. In recent years, Interlochen also became known as the place where Mr. Epstein, a celebrated donor to the school, returned to mingle with students, several of whom later said they had been subjected to his grooming and abuse. Between 1990 and 2003, he [directed] more than $400,000 to Interlochen, including $200,000 to build the Jeffrey E. Epstein Scholarship Lodge, created to house visitors and parents. In 2009, Interlochen renamed the Epstein lodge.
Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein.
[Annie] Jacobsen's new book, "Biological War: A Scenario" ... is a heavily researched book about contagious and potentially civilization-ending pathogens. Though banned by international treaty, these germs have been weaponized and hoarded by countries that include Russia, North Korea and Syria. Jacobsen has interviewed everyone, from former high-ranking members of the military, the C.I.A., FEMA and NATO to former secretaries of defense, counterterrorism experts, epidemiologists and Sam [expletive] Altman. That so many were willing to talk to her, and have their names affixed to this book, indicates the esteem in which she is held. "Biological War" is fact-based except for Jacobsen's assumption that our leaders have experience, knowledge, integrity and empathy. The infectious killer this book describes, I am sorry to say, exists. It's what's referred to as a chimera pathogen, alive and airborne, a booby-trapped hybrid of two or more viruses. In this case, the infected person first experiences a long wave of euphoria, of the sort that makes one want to rush out and dance with somebody. Later, the suffering begins. Bubbly pink sputum, hacked up bits of lung, "bestial noises," stenches on airplanes mistaken for dirty diapers. This pathogen is engineered to destroy trust in medicine. If a patient is given antibiotics – these would barely help anyway – the disease mutates into a form of deadly encephalitis.
Note: In 1977, a US Senate investigation revealed that, during the Cold War, the Army had secretly conducted at least 239 biological warfare tests by releasing bacteria into American cities and public transportation systems. In one experiment, a bacterial cloud released over the San Francisco Bay Area exposed hundreds of thousands of people, contributing to illnesses and death, and lasting changes to the region's microbial ecology. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on weapons of mass destruction, biotech dangers, and science corruption.
What's the true story behind Titu Singh's apparent reincarnation? After Titu was born, he began telling his family tales of a past life. "He would tell his mom and dad loads of stories about how he had a wife and two kids, and they owned a radio cassette shop," [Tom] Carty explains. "Sure enough, when the parents brought the boy to the radio cassette shop back then, guess who was there? His wife," Carty explains. "And he starts speaking to his wife and saying, â€I know your name, and I know our two kids' names,' and going into mad detail." Not only that, but Titu claimed he had been murdered – and he knew who did it. Eventually, the boy identified the killer, who was later prosecuted for the crime. In a 1989 study, researcher Antonia Mills documented as many of the known details about the case as possible. According to Mills, a family reported that their son, Toran "Titu" Singh, began making strange claims as soon as he could talk, around 18 months old. The family claimed that Titu said he was from the city of Agra, had a wife and children, and owned a shop in Sadar Bazaar. Most astonishingly, Titu reportedly knew that he had been killed via gunshot – though, contrary to many online versions of the events, he said that he was unable to identify the attackers. While later reports say his words were used to identify the culprit, there's no solid evidence that this is the case. Still, some people are convinced that Titu was telling the truth. There are countless other details that believers point to indicating that Titu Singh was genuinely the reborn Suresh. For example, a 1988 article in India Today reported that there was a birthmark on Titu's head in the exact location where Suresh was shot.
Note: For more inspiring and credible material on past-life memories in children, read our Substack investigations, How Consciousness Research Can Help Heal a Divided World. Explore more positive stories like this on near-death experiences and the mysterious nature of reality.
Whatever the source, at some point you'll hear about a guy who invented an engine that runs on water (or sometimes a different clean, renewable resource). This engine was going to change the world, bring about a new age, and also make its inventor very, very rich. The details about the person who invented it vary, but the story always has one constant: the U.S. government swept in, stole the invention, and shut the whole operation down–all to protect the interests of the oil industry. There's a real law on the books that makes urban legends like that one entirely plausible. It's called the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (Pub. L. 82-256, 66 Stat. 3), and if you're an American inventor whose work involves anything like cryptography, weaponry, or energy, it's a law that hangs over your head. A remnant of the Cold War, the law allows agencies within the U.S. Government to interject during a patent review process and suppress any inventions that the agency deems a "threat to national security." The law doesn't simply give the government carte blanche to permanently lock away the fruits of an inventor's labor. Under the parameters of the law, agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to NASA can issue a "secrecy order" on patents under review that they feel contain sensitive information. Of the more than 788,000 patents filed in Fiscal Year 2025, 6,543 of them were restrained by ISA. And there's no real way to find out what they are, or why they were withheld.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on energy.
Bad diets kill millions of people globally every year. Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods. In public, the world's biggest and richest food companies ... say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights. 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods. The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies. Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez. Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens' health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.
The pesticide industry has spent decades building a highly effective influence operation in Washington D.C. Its political influence did not begin with the Trump administration. But over the past 18 months, the Trump administration has delivered a string of victories to the pesticide industry that could reshape pesticide use and public health protections for years to come. U.S. Right to Know identified 26 administration officials with ties to the pesticide industry's lobbying or legal network, including 11 political appointees at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where former chemical industry lobbyists now occupy the four highest-ranking positions overseeing federal pesticide regulations. In June 2026, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and Bayer in a 7–2 decision likely to block thousands of state-level lawsuits alleging that Bayer failed to warn consumers that Roundup causes cancer. In February 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring glyphosate-based herbicides and elemental phosphorus – a raw material used in glyphosate production and military weaponry – critical to national defense and directing the federal government to prioritize their domestic production. Bayer is the sole U.S. producer of both glyphosate and elemental phosphorus. In June 2025, USDA rescinded regulations that had required farmers to keep basic records documenting when, where and how they applied restricted-use pesticides.
Note: Our Substack, "The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate," uncovers the scope of Bayer/Monsanto's media propaganda machine and the widespread conspiracy to poison our food, air, and along with the powerful remedies and solutions to this crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals.
This ivy-topped wall shelters an urban oasis, within which sits an unprecedented sustainable project. The world's first "community-powered" sauna – heated by food waste from residents of the neighbouring housing estate – is set to open here. Scraps from the kitchens of residents on the Teviot estate in Poplar, will be processed in a local-scale anaerobic digester ... to produce methane gas to power the sauna. The completely circular design is just one part of R-Urban Poplar, a civic space and "living lab" where members of the community are invited to experiment with ways of taking charge of their own food supply, while adapting to the climate crisis. Andy Belfield, an architect from the R-Urban Poplar team, says those behind the project believe it is the UK's – and the world's – first food waste powered community sauna. Nine years ago, the site was an unused car park and empty garages. Now, butterflies flutter around leaves and flowers in raised, no-dig beds. Micro-allotments and communal growing spaces offer opportunities for local people to grown herbs, courgettes, potatoes and passion flowers. But R-Urban Poplar is more ambitious than just a community garden. It is an "ecology hub", where workers and local residents are prototyping circular urban farming, mushroom-growing and restore-and-repair services. Wild spaces encourage pollinators. There is a community kitchen and classroom, a workshop and a tool library, even a mushroom farm.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and reimagining the economy.
The Pentagon is asking Congress for broad new authority to withhold unclassified records from the public, a proposal that transparency advocates say could significantly reduce the public's ability to scrutinize the nation's largest federal agency and understand how billions of taxpayer dollars are spent. The legislative proposal seeks to create a new section of federal law allowing the defense secretary to exempt certain "controlled unclassified information," or CUI, from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act if the U.S. military determines the records concern national defense vulnerabilities and concludes that the harm from disclosure outweighs the public interest. Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, [said] that for decades, there has been "a massive overclassification problem throughout the executive branch." "The last thing the government needs is a new power to withhold information under the FOIA," Kaufman wrote. If adopted, the legislation would become part of a FOIA system that has long suffered from chronic delays. The most recent annual Pentagon FOIA report said that at the end of the 2025 fiscal year, there were 30,476 backlogged requests, a 42% increase from 2024. Although FOIA requires agencies to respond within 20 working days in most cases, requests can remain pending for months or years, forcing petitioners to enter into costly litigation to compel agencies to act.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and military corruption.
When elite Swiss banker Ariane de Rothschild sought to extract her company from the teeth of a federal investigation into its role in helping high-end customers hide potentially billions from the IRS, documents show she turned to an unexpected American businessman for help: convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In this new role, Epstein appears to have helped Edmond de Rothschild, one of Europe's largest private banks, resolve a menacing Justice Department investigation, garnering him a $25 million fee. And in doing so, he displayed another facet of his ability to tap his network of wealthy and powerful patrons for his personal gain. As Epstein himself explained it in a Dec. 11, 2015, email to Rothschild, he had helped negotiate a deal for the bank to pay $45.5 million to the IRS, $10 million in legal fees, and $25 million to him. "All less than 80 [million dollars] pretty good," he wrote. The Swiss bank's American lawyer on that matter, Kathy Ruemmler, a former Obama White House attorney, will be appearing before the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about her documented longstanding ties with Epstein. In June of 2014, Epstein sent an email to Rothschild, saying, "If I can be helpful, I would be glad to, I expect no, nor do I want any financial relationship of any kind. I am doing this as my way to do good. and to repay a deep debt that i feel I owe to edmonde." This appears to be a reference to her father-in-law Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, the bank's founder, who died in 1997.
Note: Ruemmler acted as a key legal adviser to Epstein, which included killing an ABC News Interview with survivor Virginia Giuffre. In fact, Epstein's text messages show that he considered Ruemmler as his "great defender." Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein.
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.