News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
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Almost 40 years after his death following a bar brawl in Key Biscayne, Ricardo Morales, known as "Monkey" – contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer – returned to the spotlight Thursday morning when one of his sons made a startling claim on Spanish-language radio: Morales, a sniper instructor in the early 1960s in secret camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, realized in the hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees. Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his "clean-up" team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the tragic events, they were ordered to go back to Miami without learning what the mission was about. The claims ... add to one of the long-held theories about the JFK assassination – that Cuban exiles working for the CIA had been involved. But the claims also point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case. Morales Jr. said his father told them he did not know of the plans to assassinate Kennedy. "He knew Kennedy was coming to Dallas, so he imagines something is going to happen, but he doesn't know the plan," he said. "In these kinds of conspiracies ... nobody knows what the other is doing."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the JFK assassination from reliable major media sources.
The White House said Friday it would delay the release of long-classified documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. President Joe Biden wrote in a statement that the remaining files "shall be withheld from full public disclosure" until December 15 next year - nearly 60 years after Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963. In 2017, former president Donald Trump released several thousand secret files on the assassination, but withheld others on national security grounds. The White House said the national archivist needs more time for a review into that redaction, which was slowed by the pandemic. Mr. Biden also said the delay was "necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations" and that this "outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure." A 10-month investigation led by then-Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone when he fired on Kennedy's motorcade. But the Commission's investigation was criticized for being incomplete, with a Congressional committee later concluding that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." U.S. law requires that all government records on the assassination be disclosed "to enable the public to become fully informed." The National Archives has released thousands of documents to the public as part of the ... JFK Act.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the JFK assassination from reliable major media sources.
Synthetic chemicals called phthalates, found in hundreds of consumer products such as food storage containers, shampoo, makeup, perfume and children's toys, may contribute to some 91,000 to 107,000 premature deaths a year among people ages 55 to 64 in the United States, a new study found. People with the highest levels of phthalates had a greater risk of death from any cause, especially cardiovascular mortality, according to the study published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution. Phthalates are known to interfere with the body's mechanism for hormone production, known as the endocrine system, and they are "linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems," according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Even small hormonal disruptions can cause "significant developmental and biological effects," the NIEHS states. Prior research has connected phthalates with reproductive problems, such as genital malformations and undescended testes in baby boys and lower sperm counts and testosterone levels in adult males. Often called "everywhere chemicals" because they are so common, phthalates are added to consumer products such as PVC plumbing, vinyl flooring, rain- and stain-resistant products, medical tubing, garden hoses, and some children's toys. Other common exposures come from the use of phthalates in food packaging, detergents, clothing, furniture and automotive plastics.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and health from reliable major media sources.
The Oklahoma National Guard has rejected the Defense Department's requirement for all service members to receive the coronavirus vaccine and will allow personnel to sidestep the policy with no repercussions. Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, appointed this week ... as adjutant of the state's roughly 8,200 National Guard soldiers and airmen, on Thursday notified those under his command that they are not required to receive the vaccine and won't be punished if they decline it. It's an extraordinary refusal of Pentagon policy by the general and follows Stitt's written request to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seeking suspension of the requirement for Guard personnel in the state. Resistance to vaccine mandates has intensified in recent weeks, with multiple GOP governors filing suit to stop the requirement for federal contractors and a Friday court ruling temporarily halting the administration's directive that private businesses employing more than 100 workers require inoculation or impose onerous testing guidelines. Oklahoma's objection to the Pentagon's directive would appear to open another pathway for states to challenge the president's orders. Mancino's new policy walks a line between a state's military orders ... and federal military orders. For now, it appears that Oklahoma Guard members can refuse the vaccine, but that they would be subject to the requirement if they are put on active duty for a federally mandated assignment such as an overseas deployment.
Note: If you have any concern about children getting the COVID vaccine, this excellent article with links to key studies is a must read. Pfizer is clearly deceiving the public about deaths in its vaccine trials. The FDA estimates it will need 55 years to fully release all documents connected to the approval of the vaccine. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
I am not vaccinated. In a sane society, a personal decision like this would not warrant a column. But we do not live in a sane society. As a healthy 36-year-old woman, COVID-19 does not pose a statistically meaningful threat to my life. I have a 99.97 percent chance of survival. Why would I get a vaccine for a virus that I do not fear and that isn't a threat to my life–particularly when there is an element of risk from the vaccines? Despite this completely rational and data-driven viewpoint, the Biden White House recently broke its previous promise and issued federal mandates that will be applied to about 100 million Americans - two-thirds of all workers. In September, when the mandates were first announced, Biden said the guiding principle was to "protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers" and "reduce the spread of COVID-19." But the vaccines clearly haven't accomplished that goal to-date, so what exactly is the point of mandating vaccines that have thus far failed to stop the spread? What is the point of only testing the unvaccinated, when it is now clear that the vaccinated are also still spreading COVID? And why is natural immunity being completely ignored and denied any relevance whatsoever when over 100 research studies have affirmed its effectiveness? The vaccine helps protect the vaccinated from dying, but it does not protect the vaccinated from either getting or spreading COVID. The vaccine is a personal health benefit, not a public health benefit.
Note:If you have any concern about children getting the COVID vaccine, this excellent article with links to key studies is a must read. Pfizer is clearly deceiving the public about deaths in its vaccine trials. The FDA estimates it will need 55 years to fully release all documents connected to the approval of the vaccine. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
About 18 months ago, in the lockdown summer of 2020, I started to argue that the Government's response to Covid is driven not so much by medical science or epidemiology, but instead by the psychological insights of behavioural scientists. Controversial "nudge theory" lies at the heart of Westminster's response. It refers to sneaky attempts to prime, prepare and prod us into their desired mindset and course of action, without us ever realising we are being coerced. Once nudge is seen, it can't be unseen. This week, the Government may have overplayed its hand. On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist whose modelling was used as the basis for the UK's lockdown policy, made an illuminating comment on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "Nobody likes having their freedoms curtailed by measures but it's prudent to be cautious," he told presenter Sarah Smith, "and wearing masks certainly helps that: it reminds people we're not completely out of the woods yet." It was a startling admission, if we needed one, that masks are as much about psychology as they are about preventing infection. They act as a social cue, to use the language of behavioural scientists, nudging us into vigilance. These psychological cues are carefully calibrated, more so than many realise. In a document drawn up by the "Nudge Unit" ... scientists examine the success of Slovakia's mass testing programme, looking at how we could replicate that success in the UK.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
After years of declines, America's middle class now holds a smaller share of U.S. wealth than the top 1%. The middle 60% of U.S. households by income ... saw their combined assets drop to 26.6% of national wealth as of June, the lowest in Federal Reserve data going back three decades. For the first time, the super rich had a bigger share, at 27%. The data offer a window into the slow-motion erosion in the financial security of mid-tier earners. That continued through the Covid-19 pandemic, despite trillions of dollars in government relief. While "middle class" has different meanings to different people, many economists use income to define the group. The 77.5 million families in the middle 60% make about $27,000 to $141,000 annually, based on Census Bureau data. Their share in three main categories of assets - real estate, equities and private businesses - slumped in one generation. That made their lives more precarious, with fewer financial reserves to fall back on when they lose their jobs. The top 1% represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000 a year - out of a total of almost 130 million. Over the past 30 years, 10 percentage points of American wealth has shifted to the top 20% of earners, who now hold 70% of the total, Fed data show. A generation ago, the middle class held more than 44% of real estate assets in the country. Now it's down to 38%. The pandemic ... led to soaring rents this year, which hurt those who can't afford a house.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.
Since 9/11, the government has been building a huge anti-terror apparatus. In the first few days, the entire blueprint for what would happen over the next decade was written, all in secret. The public didn't know. The media didn't know. And it would take us years to find out. In secret, the administration had authorized the CIA to use what they called "enhanced interrogation techniques." They can do a lot of things that used to be considered torture. Waterboarding, for example. By any definition, it's torture. The Justice Department called it "enhanced interrogation methods" and it approved seven of them, including waterboarding. It took reporter Dana Priest years to piece together where prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were. They had been hidden in a secret network of CIA prisons known as "black sites." For the first time, the White House had approved the building of an international prison system entirely in secret. The Terrorist Surveillance Program authorized the NSA to intercept certain telephone calls and emails of American citizens without a warrant. The NSA created a global electronic dragnet capable of reaching into America's communication networks, capturing 1.7 billion intercepts every day. The NSA turned to a new force in the covert war, private contractors. You had this boom in the corporate intelligence world, as well, companies like CACI, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics. The NSA spent billions of dollars on more than 480 private companies.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and 9/11 from reliable major media sources.
The sooner most cancers are discovered, the better the odds they can be successfully treated. Mayo Clinic participated in research on a test that can detect more than 50 cancers. "My dad, he was a healthy guy. He didn't have any known risk factors for cancer," Dr. Julia Feygin said. Feygin lost her 40-year-old father to pancreatic cancer when she was 13. Diagnosed at stage three, he lived for nine more months. "I strongly believe that purpose can be found in everything that happens," Feygin said. She's now part of a team at a Menlo Park, California-based company called GRAIL that's introducing the blood test, called Galleri. She says can it catch hard-to-detect, aggressive and often deadly cancers like pancreatic, ovarian and esophageal. "If cancers can be detected early, we can dramatically improve patient outcomes," Feygin said. Feygin explains that our blood contains a DNA signature. The blood test tracks the DNA a cancer cell sheds. Two tubes of blood are drawn and sent to GRAIL's lab for analysis. "We can find and sequence these tiny bits of tumor-derived DNA in the blood and, based on the patterns we see, we can reveal if there is a signal for cancer present. We can predict with very high accuracy where in the body this cancer signal is coming from," Feygin said. An interventional study that included Mayo Clinic with 6,600 participants returned 29 signals that were followed by a cancer diagnosis. Another study found a less than 1% false positive rate.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
At least $1.7bn of funding will be given directly to indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in recognition of their key role in protecting the planet's lands and forests, it will be announced at Cop26 today. The governments of the UK, US, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands are leading the $1.7bn (Ł1.25bn) funding pledge, which is being announced as part of ambitious global efforts to reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, with campaigners cautiously hopeful that this conference of the parties (Cop) could be the first to properly champion indigenous peoples' rights. Tuntiak Katan, a leader of Ecuador's indigenous Shuar people who serves as general coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, said: "We are happy with the financing announcement, but we will be watching for concrete measures that will reveal whether the intent is to transform a system that has directed less than 1% of climate funding to indigenous and local communities. What matters is what happens next." Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said the aim was to give IPLCs more of a voice in policymaking and discourse. It is hoped more funding will follow. Walker said: "It's a first step, it's a down payment." The money will support IPLCs' capacity to govern themselves collectively, assist with mapping and registration work, back national land reform and help resolve conflict over territories. It will continue until 2025.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
"Little Amal," a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl, has big, expressive eyes and loves jumping in puddles as she travels on foot to the UK in search of a new home. But Amal isn't just any girl – she's a giant puppet more than 11 ft. tall. She's the centerpiece of The Walk, a traveling arts festival. It's the latest project by London-based theater company Good Chance, in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company. For the past three months, Amal and the crew have travelled from the Syrian-Turkish border to the UK in an effort to bring hope to the plight of refugees. Today, they reached Manchester, England, completing a 5,000-mile journey through more than 65 cities, towns and villages. Through accompanying events along the route, like installations and performances, it was important that the walk recognize the range of Amal's experiences – not just one of hardship, but resilience too, Zuabi says. "I don't want anybody to feel sad for refugees. I want people to see themselves when they see a refugee. And that's why puppets are gorgeous. Because a puppet doesn't exist until you give it life. You need to go 'she is a refugee' and the minute you treat a refugee like this, you go 'he is me. They are us.'" Even Amal's size at 11 ft. – or 3.5 meters – is deliberate. To Zuabi, visibility is the first step towards empathy. He says "to see that people are moved by a small gesture she does in the middle of a street, and suddenly you look around and people are wiping their tears – that's very, very beautiful to see," Zuabi says.
Sweden now has the lowest Covid infection rate in western Europe. The Scandinavian nation – which was subject to international scrutiny last year when it refused to lockdown – is currently recording 85.4 cases per million people. By comparison, the rate is nearly 1,400 per million in Europe's current Covid capital Austria, which today announced it is going back into a full lockdown from Monday. Sweden's infection rate is far lower than other Western European countries like the Netherlands (1,048.7), Britain (581), Germany (536), and France (201). And for the first time in the pandemic, Sweden is recording fewer cases per population size than its Scandinavian neighbours Denmark (655), Norway (351) and Finland (150). The Scandinavian nation became an international outlier last year when it defied scientific advice and refused to follow the rest of the world in shutting down society to curb the virus' spread. The country ... also has next to no Covid restrictions in place. And advice for people to wear face masks on public transport was abandoned on July. Unlike other European countries it has never made face masks compulsory or enforced compulsory lockdowns. Sweden is middle of the road when it comes to vaccine uptake in western Europe. Some 68.7 per cent of the entire population have had both doses of the virus. Sweden has cut a different path to other European countries through out the pandemic, choosing to rely on citizens to make the right choices during the first wave instead of locking down.
Note: In the list of countries with the highest deaths rates per million since the start of the pandemic, Sweden is currently #42, while the U.S. is #17 and the UK is #24. Shouldn't a country that never locked down and never required masks be at or near the top of the list? Could it be that both the lockdowns and the masks are not as effective as claimed? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.
A massive trove of private financial records shared with The Washington Post exposes vast reaches of the secretive offshore system used to hide billions of dollars from tax authorities, creditors, criminal investigators and – in 14 cases involving current country leaders – citizens around the world. The revelations include more than $100 million spent by King Abdullah II of Jordan on luxury homes in Malibu, Calif., and other locations; millions of dollars in property and cash secretly owned by the leaders of the Czech Republic, Kenya, Ecuador and other countries; and a waterfront home in Monaco acquired by a Russian woman who gained considerable wealth after she reportedly had a child with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Other disclosures hit closer to home for U.S. officials. The files provide substantial new evidence, for example, that South Dakota now rivals notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. Tens of millions of dollars from outside the United States are now sheltered by trust companies in Sioux Falls, some of it tied to people and companies accused of human rights abuses and other wrongdoing. The trove, dubbed the Pandora Papers, exceeds the dimensions of the leak that was at the center of the Panama Papers investigation five years ago. That data was drawn from a single law firm, but the new material encompasses records from 14 separate financial-services entities.
Note: Some have suggested that the CIA was responsible for the earlier Panama Papers leak. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial industry corruption from reliable major media sources.
Paul Marik, MD, one of the most highly published critical care physicians in the world and the Director of the ICU at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, was recently told by Sentara Healthcare that he could no longer administer a range of highly effective COVID-19 treatments to critically ill patients - the same treatments he has successfully used to reduce COVID deaths in the ICU by as much as 50%. The result of the prohibition has been a sharp increase in patient mortality. Because Dr. Marik can no longer stand by while patients needlessly die without proper treatment, he has filed a lawsuit to allow him and his colleagues to administer the combination of FDA-approved drugs and other therapies that has saved thousands of critically ill COVID-19 patients in the last 18 months. The Complaint filed today in the Circuit Court for the City of Norfolk, Virginia states that Sentara Healthcare is "preventing terminally ill COVID patients from exercising their right to choose and to receive safe, potentially life-saving treatment determined to be appropriate for them by their attending physician." Under Virginia law, every patient has the right to receive treatment deemed appropriate for them by their attending physician, and terminally ill patients have the right to try investigational medicines that their treating physician recommends. Through its arbitrary prohibition of the COVID-19 treatment protocol ... Sentara is violating the law and unjustly depriving critically ill patients of lifesaving treatment.
Note: Watch a video detailing successes with these treatments and obstruction by authorities of these life-saving treatments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Israel has among the world's highest levels of vaccination for COVID-19, with 78% of those 12 and older fully vaccinated. Yet the country is now logging one of the world's highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people. More than half are in fully vaccinated people. The effects of waning immunity may be beginning to show. A preprint published last month by physician Tal Patalon and colleagues ... found that protection from COVID-19 infection during June and July dropped in proportion to the length of time since an individual was vaccinated. People vaccinated in January had a 2.26 times greater risk for a breakthrough infection than those vaccinated in April. At the same time, cases in the country, which were scarcely registering at the start of summer, have been doubling every week to 10 days since then, with the Delta variant responsible for most of them. What is clear is that "breakthrough" cases are not the rare events the term implies. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. To try to tame the surge, Israel has turned to booster shots. As of Monday, nearly 1 million Israelis had received a third dose. Yet boosters are unlikely to tame a Delta surge on their own, says Dvir Aran, a biomedical data scientist at Technion. Aran's message for the United States and other wealthier nations considering boosters is stark: "Do not think that the boosters are the solution."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
Singapore is looking into an "unusual surge" of 5,324 new infections of COVID-19, the city-state's health ministry said, its highest such figure since the beginning of the pandemic, as beds in intensive care units fill up. Ten new deaths on Wednesday carried the toll to 349, after 3,277 infections the previous day, while the ICU utilisation rate is nearing 80%, despite a population that is 84% fully vaccinated, with 14% receiving booster doses. While nearly 98.7% of the past month's 90,203 cases had no symptoms, or only mild ones, about 0.2% of those had died, and 0.1% each were being monitored closely in intensive care units (ICU) or were critically ill and intubated there.
Note: If the vaccines are effective and Singapore is 84% vaccinated, why are they experiencing the highest surge ever of cases and why are their ICU's 80% full? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
On Oct. 4, 2020 ... a group of doctors and medical experts, most of them specialists in epidemiology, immunology, and related public health disciplines, published a statement challenging the wisdom of the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The primary authors of the "Great Barrington Declaration" ... were three scientists: Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and professor at Stanford Medical School. The declaration ... was soon signed by thousands of additional public health scientists and doctors. "Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health," [it said]. The scientists warned that "keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed." The relatively brief declaration was accompanied by a much more detailed analysis of lockdowns and their collateral damage, and of the best ways to shield the elderly and people in other high-risk groups. For a year, the three scientists have been "vilified." Bhattacharya [said] he is worried for his safety "amid a campaign to censor him on the [Stanford] campus where he has worked for 35 years." The Great Barrington authors were on target in doubting the advisability of sweeping lockdowns. Numerous studies have found that shutting down the economy was largely futile in preventing COVID's spread.
Note: Explore the website of the Great Barrington Declaration. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
A bomb hit the house. [Rua Moataz] Khadr and her two daughters were able to free themselves from the rubble that had fallen on them, but her 4-year-old son, Ibrahim Ahmed Yahya, was crushed to death. He was among the 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed during the yearlong battle for Mosul. Khadr, like most bombing victims in Iraq, has no idea which nation was responsible for the airstrike that killed her son. Was it an American aircraft, British, Dutch? "Even if I found out, what would I do?" she told The Intercept. In its final days in Afghanistan, the U.S. conducted a drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul – seven of them children. Their deaths bring up a thorny question surrounding the frequent U.S. killing of civilians in the 9/11 wars: What would justice look like for the families of civilians who have been wrongfully killed? The media attention generated by the Kabul strike has prompted a rare admission of guilt from the Pentagon and may ultimately lead to monetary compensation for the survivors. But byzantine laws in the U.S. make it all but impossible for foreigners to file for compensation if a relative was killed in combat. The only hope for most survivors is a "sympathy" payment from the U.S. military that does not acknowledge responsibility for causing the deaths. But unsurprisingly, those payments are rare: None were issued in 2020. Meanwhile, U.S. allies involved in bombing campaigns usually hide behind the shield of joint operations to avoid taking responsibility for civilian deaths.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
Last March, when President Obama travelled to Argentina to meet with the country's new President, Mauricio Macri, his public appearances were dogged by protesters who noisily demanded explanations, and apologies, for U.S. policies, past and present. There are few countries in the West where anti-Americanism is as vociferously expressed as in Argentina, where a highly politicized culture of grievance has evolved in which many of the country's problems are blamed on the United States. On the left, especially, there is lingering resentment over the support extended by the U.S. government to Argentina's right-wing military, which seized power in March of 1976 and launched a "Dirty War" against leftists that took thousands of lives over the following seven years. Obama's visit coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the coup. He pointedly paid homage to the Dirty War's victims by visiting a shrine built in their honor on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In an address he gave at the shrine, Obama acknowledged what he characterized as American sins of omission, but he stopped short of issuing an outright apology. "Democracies have to have the courage to acknowledge when we don't live up to the ideals that we stand for," he said. "And we've been slow to speak out for human rights, and that was the case here."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
In just a decade the Food and Drug Administration has evolved from amorphous obscurity deep within the capital bureaucracy into both the world's paramount regulator of consumer goods and the Federal Government's most criticized, demoralized and fractionalized agency. With the agency's ban on saccharin, it is again at a storm center of complaints from consumer groups that the action was too long delayed and from diet food interests that the step was capricious and without scientific justification. But the agency, a bureaucratic waif that is responsible for overseeing a staggering $200 billion worth of products yearly, is not only whipsawed by the public controversy, it is so demoralized that a number of its top positions long go unfilled, so burdened that it cannot keep up with the explosion of consumer goods and so battered by lawsuits and outside pressures that its power to make its decisions stick is sometimes undermined. In just the last three years the agency has been the target of more than 100 Congressional investigations, 50 highly critical reports by the General Accounting Office and a series of internal inquiries despairing of ever setting the place right. After his departure as Commissioner of the agency in 1969, Dr. Herbert E. Ley said that "what the F.D.A. is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day." He complained further that during his 18 month tenure he had been under "constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure" from drug industry officials.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.
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.