The recently proposed Connect Our Parks Act calls for increased cell service in parks but does not weigh the damaging impacts of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation — emitted by cellular installations — on all living creatures. Introduced by Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Angus King (I-Maine), this new bill does not consider the many ways that cell tower radiating equipment can impair ecologically sensitive areas and every living thing in its wake, ranging from insects to mammals to the plants and trees on which their survival depends. The Parks Act is one of several congressional proposals that unwittingly set the stage for dramatically increasing ambient exposures to wireless radiation, an agent that the government’s own studies have found causes cancer and DNA damage in animals. Unsurprisingly, the natural environment is also vulnerable. Studies have documented adverse impacts on birds, bees and trees, including impairment of massive seasonal migrations and the exquisitely sensitive processes of reproduction on which their continuity rests. A shocking regulatory gap exists. Not one federal agency has a mandate to assess the harmful effects of wireless radiation from cell towers, nor is any monitoring regularly conducted of the levels of wireless radiation in our environment from the several hundred thousand operating towers in the U.S. The public generally assumes cell tower radiation has been thoroughly tested for safety. Nothing could be further from the truth. Note: California firefighters' unions successfully fought to exempt cell towers from being placed on or adjacent to fire stations after firefighters reported serious neurological health problems following cell tower installations. Read the official position opposing cell towers on fire stations from The International Association of Fire Fighters. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the risks and dangers of wireless technologies. - The Hill

Most countries around the world limit the time that a prisoner can spend in solitary to 15 days. The United States doesn’t. There are scores of prisoners across the U.S. who have been in solitary for years and, in some cases, for decades. It should be clear to everybody—the courts, the states, and the federal Bureau of Prisons—that solitary only worsens already bad situations. It shouldn’t be in use. There is a growing body of research that shows that solitary confinement as it is used today can cause a variety of severe psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, and suicidal thoughts. These problems can be so severe that they can lead to long-term disability or even death. The longer a person is held in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. The younger a person is when he begins a sentence in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. And the situation is usually hopeless when a person who is already mentally ill is placed in solitary, whatever his age. It’s no wonder that the United Nations has declared the U.S. practice of solitary confinement to be a form of torture. In 2016, Kalief Browder killed himself after spending three years in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail in New York City. Browder was 16 years old when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was never convicted of a crime, but he was held in solitary while he awaited trial. Note: The above article was written by whistleblower John Kiriakou. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption. - Covert Action

Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history. Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time. Birkenfeld’s boss, Christian Bovay, conceived the scam that Birkenfeld participated in by which UBS would charge a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing it securely in one of the bank’s secret off-shore accounts. Birkenfeld would make clients more money by investing, often in weapons manufacturers. Then when the clients needed their money, UBS would lend it back at a reasonable interest rate. Birkenfeld wrote in Lucifer’s Banker that “UBS was making a fee for holding the guy’s cash in the first place, then making another fee for loaning him his own damn money! And guess what? That guy’s happy! He’s getting his deal done, and he’s still doing it with tax-free cash! I couldn’t believe it, and you know what? It worked, over and over again.” On October 5, 2005, Birkenfeld resigned from UBS and became an internal whistleblower. After a company review of its malpractice turned into a whitewash, Birkenfeld sued UBS. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the court system and in the banking industry. - Covert Action

The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) has agreed to pay $115m to more than 100 survivors of a major sexual abuse scandal, a historic settlement of litigation that exposed widespread misconduct of officers at a federal prison. The payout settles 103 claims of sexual abuse and retaliation for reporting misconduct by people who were incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a troubled women’s institution located in California. Staff harassment and assault of those in custody at FCI Dublin ... was pervasive and widely documented, and the facility was known internally as the “rape club”. Seven former Dublin employees, including the warden who ran the prison and the chaplain, have been criminally convicted of sexual crimes, and more than 20 other employees were placed on leave and under investigation. The bureau announced the permanent closure of Dublin earlier this month, and former residents have been transferred to other federal prisons across the country. The settlement appears to be the largest single payout in BoP history. The agreement is a major victory for advocates fighting misconduct in women’s prisons, who have documented how sexual abuse is a systemic problem across the US prison system. Staff have sexually abused incarcerated residents in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons over the last decade, with some women abused for months and years, a US Senate inquiry found in 2022. Note: To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals. - The Guardian

The United States today has by far the world’s largest incarceration rate, with nearly two million people living in prisons and jails. The conditions in those facilities are often substandard, with Amnesty International criticizing the dehumanizing practice of holding prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement. Assistant professor of history [Benjamin] Weber writes of an “unspoken doctrine of prison imperialism” by which U.S. policy makers sought to “govern the globe through the codification and regulation of crime.” Weber adds that, “as prison imperialism expanded outwards, it always returned home producing new forms of social control over the growing number of people ensnared in prison in the United States. The forms of policing and record keeping that gave rise to the surveillance state between World War II and the Cold War were pioneered through overseas colonialism, covert operations and military interventions.” When the U.S. colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, mass incarceration became a linchpin of counterinsurgency strategy. It was designed to suppress the nationalist rebellion and messianic peasant leaders like Felipe Salvador, a leader of the anti-Spanish resistance. Weber emphasizes that the racial hierarchies and oppressive treatment of captives in colonial wars and inmates in colonial enclaves helped shape the mistreatment of minority groups and left-wing subversives in U.S. jails. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption. - Covert Action

On June 4, 2000, John Millis, a former CIA case officer then serving as the top staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, died of a reported suicide at a seedy Fairfax, Virginia motel after he was found with a gunshot wound to the head. Millis’ death occurred the day after he forced the CIA to release a controversial report he had authored on the CIA’s alleged links to cocaine smuggling by Nicaraguan drug rings who were connected with criminal groups in Los Angeles. The Fairfax police refused to reveal the contents of an alleged suicide note written by Millis and the Fairfax County Coroner’s report. Fairfax city detectives told residents of the motel where Millis died not to talk to anyone about the “suicide,” including the media. In 1996 and 1997, [Millis] was staff director of a special Congressional committee that investigated the Clinton administration’s approval of arms shipments from Iran to Muslim forces in Bosnia. These Muslims forces included two alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mindhar, and alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with other Al Qaeda operatives. Two months after Millis’ death, Insight Magazine, owned by the right-wing Washington Times, claimed that Millis had killed himself because his wife, Linda, discovered that he was involved in a homosexual relationship. The article is believed to have been CIA disinformation that was part of the coverup of Millis’ murder. Note: Journalist Gary Webb also died by apparent suicide after exposing CIA involvement with drug trafficking. Read our in-depth Substack, "How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline," which reveals undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain power. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs. - Covert Action

For decades, Khoji Wesselius has noticed the oily scent of pesticides during spraying periods when the wind has blown through his tiny farming village in a rural corner of the Netherlands. Now, after volunteering in an experiment to count how many such substances people are subjected to, Wesselius and his wife are one step closer to understanding the consequences of living among chemical-sprayed fields of seed potato, sugar beet, wheat, rye and onion. “We were shocked,” said Wesselius ... who had exposure to eight different pesticides through his skin, with even more chemicals found through tests of his blood, urine and stool. “I was contaminated by 11 sorts of pesticides. My wife, who is more strict in her organic nourishment, had seven sorts of pesticides.” Regulators closely monitor dietary intake of pesticides when deciding whether they are safe enough for the market, but little attention has been paid to the effects of breathing them in or absorbing them through the skin. According to a new study, even people who live far from farms are exposed to several different types of pesticides from non-dietary sources. The researchers got 641 participants in 10 European countries to wear silicone wristbands continuously for one week to capture external exposure to 193 pesticides. In laboratory tests, they detected 173 of the substances they tested for, with pesticides found in every wristband and an average of 20 substances for every person who took part. Note: Our latest Substack, "The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate," uncovers the scope of 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 food system corruption and toxic chemicals. - The Guardian

On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein ... saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. When Mark heard news about Jeffrey’s death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body. At first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed. “I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail,” Mark said. When he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn’t call it a suicide because it “looked too much like a homicide.” Fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey’s neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: “Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did].” Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey’s death looked more like a homicide than a suicide. The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, “pending further study.” Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman’s assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report. Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein’s death—including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. According to CBS News, nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. - Covert Action

A Campbell’s Soup Company executive has been put on temporary leave after he allegedly referred to the firm’s offerings as “shit for fucking poor people” – a remark purportedly caught on an audio recording and attributed to him in a former employee’s wrongful termination lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in Wayne county circuit court in Michigan by Robert Garza, who had joined Campbell’s New Jersey headquarters remotely in September 2024 as a security analyst. Garza alleges he was fired in January after he raised concerns about comments made by Martin Bally, Campbell’s vice-president of information technology – including referring to one of the company’s ingredients as “bioengineered meat” while going off on a racist tirade. In audio recordings captured by Garza after sensing that “something wasn’t right,” which were later reviewed by the Michigan news outlet WDIV, a voice can be heard saying: “We have shit for fucking poor people.” The voice adds: “Who buys our shit? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely any more. It’s not healthy now that I know what the fuck’s in it ... bioengineered meat. “I don’t wanna eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer.” Garza says he felt “pure disgust” after the meeting but kept the recording private until January, when he reported Bally’s behaviour to supervisor JP Aupperle, according to WDIV. Garza said he was dismissed from Campbell’s 20 days later and without any prior disciplinary action. Note: Read our Substack article on how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporate cartels fueling the chronic health crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption. - The Guardian