News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
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Drug ads have been ubiquitous on TV since the late 1990s and have spilled onto the internet and social media. The United States and New Zealand are the only countries that legally allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Manufacturers have spent more than $1 billion a month on ads in recent years. Last year, three of the top five spenders on TV advertising were drug companies. A 2023 study found that, among top-selling drugs, those with the lowest levels of added benefit tended to spend more on advertising to patients than doctors. "I worry that direct-to-consumer advertising can be used to drive demand for marginally effective drugs or for drugs with more affordable or more cost-effective alternatives," the study's author, Michael DiStefano ... said. Indeed, more than 50% of what Medicare spent on drugs from 2016 through 2018 was for drugs that were advertised. The government has, in recent years, tried to ensure that prescription-drug advertising gives a more accurate and easily understood picture of benefits and harms. But the results have been disappointing. When President Donald Trump's administration tried to get drugmakers to list the price of any treatments costing over $35 on TV ads, for example, the industry took it to federal court, saying the mandate violated drugmakers' First Amendment rights. Big Pharma won. With a bit of commonsense, truth-in-advertising enforcement, many of the ads would disappear.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.
The pharmaceutical industry, as a whole and by its nature, is conflicted and significantly driven by the mighty dollar, rather than altruism. A 2020 peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association outlines the extent of the problem. The group studied both the type of illegal activity and financial penalties imposed on pharma companies between the years 2003 and 2016. Of the companies studied, 85 percent (22 of 26) had received financial penalties for illegal activities with a total combined dollar value of $33 billion. The illegal activities included manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs, misleading marketing, failure to disclose negative information about a product (i.e. significant side effects including death), bribery to foreign officials, fraudulently delaying market entry of competitors, pricing and financial violations, and kickbacks. The highest penalties were awarded to Schering-Plough, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Allergan, and Wyeth. The biggest overall fines have been paid by GSK (almost $10 billion), Pfizer ($2.9 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($2.6 billion), and other familiar names including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Merck, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough, Sanofi Aventis, and Wyeth. Five US states – Texas, Kansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – are taking Pfizer to court for withholding information, and misleading and deceiving the public through statements made in marketing its Covid-19 injection.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.
A MintPress News investigation into the funding sources of U.S. foreign policy think tanks has found that they are sponsored to the tune of millions of dollars every year by weapons contractors. Arms manufacturing companies donated at least $7.8 million last year to the top fifty U.S. think tanks, who, in turn, pump out reports demanding more war and higher military spending, which significantly increase their sponsors' profits. The only losers in this closed, circular system are the American public, saddled with higher taxes, and the tens of millions of people around the world who are victims of the U.S. war machine. The think tanks receiving the most tainted cash were, in order, the Atlantic Council, CSIS, CNAS, the Hudson Institute, and the Council on Foreign Relations, while the weapons manufacturers most active on K-Street were Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics. There is obviously a massive conflict of interest if groups advising the U.S. government on military policy are awash with cash from the arms industry. The Atlantic Council alone is funded by 22 weapons companies, totaling at least $2.69 million last year. Even a group like the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, established in 1910 as an organization dedicated to reducing global conflict, is sponsored by corporations making weapons of war, including Boeing and Leonardo, who donate tens of thousands of dollars annually.
Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
On Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks out from the election, with Joe and President Donald Trump neck and neck in the polls, the New York Post's first story about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop exploded like a bomb. The front page featured an email from Hunter's Burisma paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking him for "the opportunity to meet your father." It was hard to square with Joe's assertions throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter's seeming international influence-peddling operation. Even as Twitter and Facebook, in collusion with the FBI, censored The Post, and the mainstream media collectively looked the other way, the Biden campaign knew that the sheer weight of the evidence would eventually be impossible to ignore. [Antony] Blinken's solution was to set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of "Russian disinformation," ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story. CIA veteran Mike Morell [organized] 50 intelligence colleagues to sign a letter falsely insinuating that the damning material from Hunter's laptop published by The Post was Russian disinformation. The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Joe, by giving him a "talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue," as Morell put it.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
At Fort Liberty, thousands of soldiers who were trained on the Army's antiterrorism policy saw slides that labeled several legitimate nonprofits as terrorist organizations – a blunder that went on for seven years before photos of the slides were posted to social media this summer, prompting outrage. Nonprofits that were incorrectly labeled as terrorist groups included People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, as well as the anti-abortion groups Operation Rescue and National Right to Life. The advocacy groups Earth First, Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front were also listed. "Incorrectly labeling legitimate organizations as terrorist groups not only undermines the credibility of the training, but also puts service members at risk of being unfairly scrutinized or penalized based on their associations or memberships," said Rep. Andy Kim, D-NJ. "We must be cautious and purposeful in how we define and identify threats to our national security." The soldier who created the slides was an employee of the local garrison and added the nonprofits based on open-source research. The Army didn't find any evidence that the soldier sought to subvert Defense Department policy or to further a personal political viewpoint. Members of Congress first became aware of Fort Liberty's antiterrorism training this summer, when photos of slides used during a July 10 training were shared online.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
Leah Garcés considered Craig Watts her enemy. As CEO and president of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has devoted her life to protecting animals. When she met Watts in the spring of 2014 at his poultry farm in North Carolina, he was one those factory farmers she deeply despised. Watts had raised over 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the US. He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken houses. Squeezed by Perdue's profit margins, Watts struggled to pay the bills. Garcés realized that Watts was not her enemy, but an ally: Chicken farmers like him wanted to end chicken farming as much as she did. Yet because of his hefty loans, Watts saw no way out. Together, they released footage from the horrors of chicken farming in the New York Times. Watts has now become one of the poster farmers for the Transfarmation Project, which Garcés founded as an offshoot of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals in 2019. Ultimately, Garcés's vision is not just "helping a few dozen farmers transition to a healthier and more sustainable model, it is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming." The Transfarmation Project connects farmers with consultants and is producing resources and pilots to model successful transitions. In the same warehouse where Watts once had to kill chickens and where he and Garcés filmed the whistleblower video, he is now harvesting mushrooms.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our Earth.
There is a massive battery right under your feet. Unlike a flammable lithium ion battery, though, this one is perfectly stable, free to use, and ripe for sustainable exploitation: the Earth itself. While temperatures above ground fluctuate throughout the year, the ground stays a stable temperature, meaning that it is humming with geothermal energy. "Every building sits on a thermal asset," said Cameron Best, director of business development at Brightcore Energy in New York, which deploys geothermal systems. "I really don't think there's any more efficient or better way to heat and cool our homes." A couple of months ago Eversource Energy commissioned the US's first networked geothermal neighbourhood operated by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. Pipes run down boreholes 600-700ft (about 180-215 metres) deep, where the temperature of the rock is consistently 55F (13C). A mixture of water and propylene glycol ... pumps through the piping, absorbing that geothermal energy. Heat pumps use the liquid to either heat or cool a space. If deployed across the country, these geothermal systems could go a long way in helping decarbonise buildings, which are responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Once a system is in place, buildings can draw heat from water pumped from below their foundations, instead of burning natural gas. The networks ... can be set up almost anywhere.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.
In December 2016, William Akley sat down in his sprawling headquarters for the biggest gas utility in Massachusetts, Eversource. Across the table were three women from a group that had become increasingly troublesome to his company. The group was Mothers Out Front, and it had been doing things like dressing up in orange costumes depicting gas flames and putting big signs where the company's natural gas lines leaked into the air. As the meeting started, Zeyneb Magavi and each of the other mothers calmly explained their passion to Mr. Akley: "I have three kids," Ms. Magavi said. "I'm worried about climate change. And I'm worried about their future." It was the start of an unlikely partnership that eventually became an audacious idea: to use heat from underground – instead of natural gas – to both cool and heat homes and buildings. The test of that idea is now blinking on in Framingham, Massachusetts. Eversource workers have buried a mile-long loop of plastic pipe underground ... to collect geothermal energy. They are now connecting the loop to heat and cool 36 buildings – homes, a fire station, and businesses. It is the first U.S. trial of this innovative technology being provided to an entire neighborhood by a major utility. It's the kind of scaled-up model that could bring a wholesale change to the nation's infrastructure, replacing natural gas just as natural gas supplanted coal and oil in much of the United States.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.
UnHerd, the Britain-based publication I lead, published an investigation on April 17 into a transatlantic organization called the Global Disinformation Index. Having received money from the U.S. State Department, as well as the British, German and European Union governments, the GDI issues what amount to blacklists of news publications, on highly tendentious grounds, that online advertising exchanges then consult and can use to justify turning off ad revenue. What has emerged ... is an opaque network of private and government-supported enterprises that appear intent on censoring political views they find unpalatable. When the [GDI] was originally set up, in 2018, it defined disinformation as "deliberately false content, designed to deceive." On this basis, you could see the argument for having fact-checkers to identify the most egregious offenders. But mission creep has set in at the GDI. It has since come up with a definition of disinformation that encompasses anything that deploys an "adversarial narrative" – stories that might be factually true but pit people against one another by creating "a risk of harm to at-risk individuals, groups or institutions" – with institutions defined as including "the current scientific or medical consensus." The de facto alliance between government and groups working to defund disfavored publications – a sort of state censorship laundering arrangement – is particularly alarming. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act [bars] the Defense Department from placing military-recruitment advertising in publications utilizing GDI, NewsGuard or "any similar entity." The unaddressed problem with these disinformation referees is how their rulings affect online ad services themselves, not just advertisers, with the power to throttle revenue to publications simply for ideological reasons.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.
A little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms including The Post – at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against "misinformation." The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world's top companies – including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald's, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart – and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found. "The extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms," the Republican-led panel said in its 39-page report. The new report establishes links between the WFA's "responsible media" initiative and the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based group that in 2022 unveiled an ad blacklist of 10 news outlets whose opinion sections tilted conservative or libertarian, including The Post, RealClearPolitics and Reason magazine. Internal communications suggest that rather than using an objective rubric to guide decisions, GARM members simply monitored disfavored outlets closely to be able to find justification to demonetize them.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.
The FBI is abusing its security clearance process to "purge" political conservatives from the bureau, according to recent whistleblower disclosures. The federal law enforcement agency's Security Division has been suspending or revoking clearances for employees whose political affiliation or COVID-19 vaccination status are suspect, a supervisory special agent who formerly worked in the division alleges. he unnamed agent, who is described as "a registered Democrat" and is represented by the nonprofit Empower Oversight, further claims that high-ranking officials in the division believed "if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as security concerns and unworthy to work at the FBI." In the case of Marcus Allen, a former FBI staff operations specialist (SOS) suspended without pay for more than two years, the officials ignored "possibly exculpatory information" and overruled investigators who "concluded [that] the suspension of his security clearance was not warranted." That decision came after Allen informed his supervisors ... that he did not intend to take the COVID-19 vaccine. "The FBI has used the clearance process as a means to force employees out of the FBI by inflicting severe financial distress: suspending their clearance, suspending them from duty without pay, [and] requiring them to obtain permission to take any other job while stuck in this unpaid limbo," [Empower President Tristan Leavitt] told House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Activists had come to protest the expansion of Camp Grayling, already the largest National Guard training facility in the country. "Want blood on your hands?" read the flyers activists distributed on recruiting tables. "Sign up for a government job." When the recruiters returned from lunch, two protesters rushed in, dousing the NSA recruiting table and two Navy personnel with fake blood sprayed out of a ketchup container. The local sheriff's office in Oakland County, Michigan, documented the incident in a case report as a hate crime against law enforcement. The FBI recorded the incident as part of a terrorism investigation. Treating the Stop Camp Grayling protesters as terrorists is the latest episode in a worldwide trend of governments smearing climate and environmental activists as terrorists. Misapplication of the terrorism label frequently serves as pretext for invasive surveillance and sustained scrutiny. Stop Camp Grayling – like most other movements organized around environmental activism – is not engaged in any type of systematic criminal activity. Movement adherents have never endangered human life. Yet the FBI saw fit to share an activist zine with military intelligence, drag in other alphabet agencies, and justify physical surveillance operations – all underpinned by the designation of the movement as worthy of a domestic terrorism investigation.
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.
A whistleblower group is suing the Department of Justice over its efforts to "secretly surveil" congressional staff conducting oversight on the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research says in a civil suit filed Tuesday that the DOJ has repeatedly stonewalled records requests involving the "undisputed" surveillance. Its suit seeks to force the Justice Department to hand over records related to the alleged unconstitutional surveillance. Empower's founder, Jason Foster, discovered in October that he was one of those congressional staff members surveilled by the Justice Department while serving as Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley's chief investigative counsel. "Last fall, @Google told me @TheJusticeDept forced it to secretly turn over my comms records in 2017," Foster posted on X, referencing a Sept. 12 subpoena that year for his private cell phone and email communications. Foster confirmed the DOJ and FBI also "targeted a dozen or so other Capitol Hill attorneys' personal accounts – from both political parties" who were looking into the FBI misconduct that included Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses as well. Both federal law-enforcement agencies later imposed non-disclosure orders for six years on Google and other big tech giants such as Apple and Verizon that had been subpoenaed for congressional staff communications.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
It wasn't so long ago that the traditional film and television business was thriving. The Big Six media conglomerates–General Electric, Time Warner, Sony, Disney, News Corporation, and Viacom–ruled the industry. But the double whammy of streaming and the pandemic toppled the old-media oligopoly. So most of the legacy media giants now are struggling simply to survive, while a new breed of digital-age behemoths, led by Amazon and Apple, gauge their film and television prospects, and Disney and Netflix lead the way into an uncharted online landscape. The failure of the conglomerates to adapt is none too surprising. Spurred by Reagan-era economic policies and the FCC's deregulation campaign, the media industries converged in a series of M&A waves that began in the 1980s with the News Corp–Fox, Time-Warner, and Sony-Columbia mergers and culminated in the acquisition of Universal by GE, NBC's owner, and the launch of NBC Universal in 2004. At that point, the Big Six owned all the major film studios, all the broadcast networks, and most of the top cable networks. They dominated other media industries as well, but their key assets were their film and television holdings. The Disney+ launch was a tipping point in the streaming era, prompting the ramp-up of Warner's HBO Max, NBCU's Peacock and ViacomCBS's Paramount+. It also came just before the outbreak of Covid-19, which accelerated the global move to streaming.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media corruption from reliable sources.
In a Brooklyn subway station on Sunday afternoon, police shot and injured three people and a fellow New York Police Department officer over a $2.90 fare. Sunday's police shooting should be a lesson in why the subway should not be teeming with cops, responding to "crimes" of poverty – like fare evasion and panhandling – with deadly force. The NYPD recorded more stops of New Yorkers in 2023 than it has in nearly a decade, and 89 percent of those who were stopped are Black and Latine. A staggering 93 percent of riders arrested for subway fare evasion were Black or Latine. Police have arrested 1,700 people for fare evasion and ticketed another 28,000 people so far this year. Overtime pay for police in the subways skyrocketed from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million in 2023. "The NYPD spent $150 Million *extra* last year to catch people who weren't able to afford to pay the subway fare. They owed just $104,000," wrote civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger on X, referring to the total of fares unpaid by fare evaders caught by police in 2023. "$150 million could buy free fares ... for 95,000 poor New Yorkers." It would be naive, however, to overlook the deeply entrenched political economy of carceral punishment in New York and throughout the country – treating poor people, particularly Black people, as accounts from which to extract fines or bodies to fill jails and prisons. It will take more than fiscal sense to upend the current bipartisan political consensus around "law and order."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption from reliable major media sources.
Two large-scale, coordinated attacks this week rocked Lebanon – the latest iteration in a historical pattern of booby-trapping electronics. On Tuesday, one attack caused pagers to explode across Lebanon and Syria, injuring thousands of people and killing at least 12. A second wave of bombings unfolded on Wednesday, when explosives detonated inside a slew of hand-held radios across the country, leaving nine dead and 300 wounded. Israel, which is widely assumed to be behind both attacks, reportedly booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members, carrying out a similar feat with the hand-held radios. The bombings appear to be supply-chain attacks – meaning the gadgets were tampered with or outright replaced with rigged devices containing explosives and a detonator at some point prior to arriving in the hands of the targets. The tactic of turning an electronic gadget into an explosive device ... dates back at least half a century. Field Manual 5-31, titled simply "Boobytraps" and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965, describes the titular objects as explosive charges "cunningly contrived to be fired by an unsuspecting person who disturbs an apparently harmless object or performs a presumably safe act." In 1996, the Israeli Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, is said to used a similar technique to detonate a small charge of explosives near the ear of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash.
Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
One day after pagers detonated across Lebanon, reportedly killing twelve people ... a second wave of explosions has been reported across the country. Today's detonations were reportedly through the manipulation of walkie-talkies made by ICOM, a Japanese firm whose American branch also serves as a significant supplier to the U.S. military. The combined confirmed death toll has already reached 26, and roughly 3,000 people have been reported injured. The Tuesday explosions are primarily linked to the ICOM IC-V82, an electronic receiver with both military and civilian uses. ICOM, based in Osaka, Japan, has a global footprint. U.S. government disclosures show that the company's American affiliate has received at least $8.2 million in contracts with the U.S. federal government since 2008. The series of explosions in Lebanon have raised concerns about the future of war that includes infiltration of supply chains and limitless exploits through electronically connected devices. The attacks will likely fuel increased scrutiny over military and civilian supply chain security, which has long been a potential vulnerability. The two rounds of blasts happened one day after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly stepped up demands for the U.S. to support "military action" against Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia linked to Iran. Social media posts have also claimed that ATMs, solar panels, and other electronic devices across Lebanon exploded today.
Note: Intelligence agencies from several countries have infiltrated computer supply chains to spy on people more easily. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
From the start of U.S. investigations into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the question of whether the Saudi government might have been involved has hovered over the case. New evidence has emerged to suggest more strongly than ever that at least two Saudi officials deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers. Most of the evidence has been gathered in a long-running federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by survivors of the attacks and relatives of those who died. The court files also raise questions about whether the FBI and CIA, which repeatedly dismissed the significance of Saudi links to the hijackers, mishandled or deliberately downplayed evidence of the kingdom's possible complicity in the attacks. The plaintiffs' account still leaves significant gaps in the story of how two known al-Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, avoided CIA surveillance overseas, flew into Los Angeles under their own names and then ... settled in Southern California. Still, the lawsuit has exposed layers of contradictions and deceit in the Saudi government's portrayal of Omar al-Bayoumi. FBI agents identified Bayoumi as having helped the two young Saudis rent an apartment, set up a bank account and take care of other needs. Bayoumi, then 42, was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, in Birmingham, England. After pressure from Saudi diplomats, Bayoumi was freed by the British authorities without being charged. U.S. officials did not try to have him extradited.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.
Mr. Brian Hance is urgently attempting to get the police to investigate what he says is an organized international bicycle smuggling ring depriving hundreds of Americans of their high-end bikes. The police in counties like Sonoma, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz didn't listen to him. "We're not Interpol" they would say. Mr. Hance took up the charge himself, putting together dossiers of evidence on a one-man mission to prevent bike theft in America. Submitting them to various district attorneys, he watched as several key cogs in a giant machine of sophisticated bike theft and smuggling were dismantled. Hance runs Bike Index, a website where bike owners can register their bikes with serial numbers and photos to help ensure that if they're ever stolen, there's a community of people who may be able to help find it. There are 1.3 million bikes on the site. In the spring of 2020, scores of high-end bikes began appearing as missing on Bike Index, and Hance began seeing pictures on Facebook and Instagram of bikes for sale that matched the descriptions of those listed as stolen. Hance urged theft victims to report the crime in as detailed a way as possible to build a case file, and then ask the police to contact him so he could explain what he had stumbled upon. Finally, a major development occurred when the Attorney General's office of Colorado indicted eight people on 227 counts of theft, including 29 bike shop burglaries. All eight pled guilty.
Note: Read about Iceland's "bike whisperer," the man who finds stolen bicycles and helps thieves change. Explore more positive stories like this about repairing criminal justice.
Latin America is the world's most dangerous region due to cartel and gang violence. It has 9% of the global population but one-third of the world's homicides. Kidnapping and extortion are on the rise. The trend is driving a turn toward increasingly militarized solutions. El Salvador, for example, has incarcerated some 75,000 people – nearly 2% of its population – in recent years on suspicion of being involved in gangs. In Colombia, by contrast, exchanging the threat of arrest for dialogue is a key part of the government's painstaking strategy of negotiating peace simultaneously with some 20 armed factions to end 60 years of conflict. That process, known as Paz Total ("total peace") and launched less than two years ago by President Gustavo Petro, has been marked by reversals and unintended effects. But a key distinction lies in its emphasis on both empathy and the rule of law. The strategy's first example of "restorative incarceration," launched earlier this month, shows how. In exchange for admitting guilt for violent acts and seeking forgiveness from victims and the families, 48 military and former guerrilla leaders are now serving "sentences" by planting trees and helping heal the communities they once dominated through fear. "We're going to sow life to try to make amends and build peace," [said] Henry Torres, a former army general. As Colombia's new attorney general put it, "our mission will be ... a mission for the dignity and well-being of our people." Peace requires patience, said Juan Manuel Santos, a former president who negotiated a 2016 peace accord with Colombia's main guerrilla faction that still serves as a template for Mr. Petro's broader peace plan. "You need to convince, to persuade, to change people's sentiments, to teach them how to forgive, how to reconcile," he told The Harvard Gazette.
Note: A prison in Brazil with low recidivism rates uses a humane approach, where there are no armed guards and inmates have the keys to their own cells. Explore more positive stories like this about repairing criminal justice.
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.