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Google's New AI Tool Fuels Fake News, The Innocent Misidentified by Facial Recognition, The All-Female Patrol Protecting Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest
Revealing News Articles
June 11, 2024

Dear friends,

Welcome to our weekly newsletter, where we summarize important news articles from reliable sources on controversial issues that impact our lives. This week we've summarized key news articles on:

  • Google's AI delivering untrue information to people trying to search the web
  • efforts from major news publishers to convince the US government to stop Google's AI from providing overviews of material from their websites
  • the rise of flawed facial recognition technology used by stores and police departments
  • how the greed of the prison-industrial complex squeezes slave profits out of imprisoned people through the exploitation of the 13th Amendment
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci's admission that there was no scientific basis for the pandemic policies that caused millions to suffer
  • new data showing that the National Institutes of Health and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic
  • one in 9 children in the US now diagnosed with ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
  • evidence that the CIA has been shielding Hunter Biden from the legal consequences of his actions
  • $3.5 billion diverted from the Commerce Department to a secret Pentagon program

Our inspiring stories (skip to this section now):

  • the women organizing to protect Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest
  • "electric harps" that protect honeybees from predatory hornets
  • how the citizens of Bogotá, Columbia take back the streets of their city once a week

Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the news source listed. If any link fails, see this page. The most important sentences are highlighted. By educating ourselves and spreading the word, we can work together to create a more free and informed society.

With faith in a transforming world,
Mark Bailey and Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

Video of the week: Check out our latest 34-min interview with prominent civil rights lawyer Daniel Sheehan about the latest developments regarding UFO/UAP disclosure. In the video, we explore the implications of UFO secrecy and what a responsible end to the secrecy might look like. We also discuss the barriers to disclosure, including the illegal destruction of important records, organized disinformation and blackmail campaigns, and the role of the media in setting the tone about these controversial issues.


Cats on the moon? Google’s AI tool is producing misleading responses that have experts worried
May 24, 2024, Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/google-ai-overviews-96e763ea2a6203978f581ca9c10f1b07

Ask Google if cats have been on the moon and it used to spit out a ranked list of websites so you could discover the answer for yourself. Now it comes up with an instant answer generated by artificial intelligence - which may or may not be correct. “Yes, astronauts have met cats on the moon, played with them, and provided care,” said Google’s newly retooled search engine. It added: “For example, Neil Armstrong said, ‘One small step for man’ because it was a cat’s step. Buzz Aldrin also deployed cats on the Apollo 11 mission.” None of this is true. Similar errors — some funny, others harmful falsehoods — have been shared on social media since Google this month unleashed AI overviews, a makeover of its search page that frequently puts the summaries on top of search results. It’s hard to reproduce errors made by AI language models — in part because they’re inherently random. They work by predicting what words would best answer the questions asked of them based on the data they’ve been trained on. They’re prone to making things up — a widely studied problem known as hallucination. Another concern was a deeper one — that ceding information retrieval to chatbots was degrading the serendipity of human search for knowledge, literacy about what we see online, and the value of connecting in online forums with other people who are going through the same thing.Those forums and other websites count on Google sending people to them, but Google’s new AI overviews threaten to disrupt the flow of money-making internet traffic.

Note: Read more about the potential dangers of Google's new AI tool. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on artificial intelligence controversies from reliable major media sources.


News Publishers Try To Sic the Government on Google AI
June 3, 2024, Reason
https://reason.com/2024/06/03/news-publishers-try-to-sic-the...

"Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators," the News/Media Alliance—a major news industry trade group—wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It asked the agencies to use antitrust authority "to stop Google's latest expansion of AI Overviews," a search engine innovation that Google has been rolling out recently. Overviews offer up short, AI-generated summaries paired with brief bits of text from linked websites. Overviews give "comprehensive answers without the user ever having to click to another page," the The New York Times warns. And this worries websites that rely on Google to drive much of their traffic. "It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content," Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing (owner of 68 daily newspapers), told the Times. Media websites have gotten used to Google searches sending them a certain amount of traffic. But that doesn't mean Google is obligated to continue sending them that same amount of traffic forever. It is possible that Google's pivot to AI was hastened by how hostile news media has been to tech companies. We've seen publishers demanding that search engines and social platforms pay them for the privilege of sharing news links, even though this arrangement benefits publications (arguably more than it does tech companies) by driving traffic.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on artificial intelligence controversies from reliable major media sources.


'I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech'
May 25, 2024, BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945

Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara ... was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch. She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology. Facewatch later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error. Facewatch is used in numerous stores in the UK. It's not just retailers who are turning to the technology. On the day we were filming, the Metropolitan Police said they made six arrests with the assistance of the tech. 192 arrests have been made so far this year as a result of it. But civil liberty groups are worried that its accuracy is yet to be fully established, and point to cases such as Shaun Thompson's. Mr Thompson, who works for youth-advocacy group Streetfathers, didn't think much of it when he walked by a white van near London Bridge. Within a few seconds, he was approached by police and told he was a wanted man. But it was a case of mistaken identity. "It felt intrusive ... I was treated guilty until proven innocent," he says. Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, has filmed the police on numerous facial-recognition deployments. She says that anyone's face who is scanned is effectively part of a digital police line-up.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on artificial intelligence controversies from reliable major media sources.


Navigating the Deadly Maze of the Prison Industrial Complex
May 24, 2024, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/24/navigating-the-deadly-maze...

The greed of the prison industrial complex squeezing slave profits out of imprisoned people through the exploitation of the 13th amendment and the brutal system set up to limit opportunity usually leaves most who walk through the gates hopeless and abandoned. "At the point that I got to prison, I had never went into the liquor store and never pulled a tricker," [said former inmate Dorsey Nunn]. "I never did kill anybody. And I had never thought about killing anybody. We talked about the marriage of, of profit and you talk about the prison industrial complex, which is, essentially the practice of, marrying profit and punishment. One of the ugly realities in California under article one, section six, you still claim as a society to practice slavery, the right to practice slavery on the government level. They call it involuntary servitude. They mentioned it again in the 13th amendment. So people are still laboring without consent. The maximum amount of money that I was paid was 32 cents an hour. The maximum amount of money that I was paid for working a month. It’s $32 a month, so at a certain point and the maximum amount of money that they gave me to start this fresh new life with was $200 gate money, and they’ve been giving that probably since the early seventies, no account for inflation, no account for anything. And they say, start your life over. People are rising up to do away with and challenge the notion of the 13th Amendment and the practice of slavery. Should we actually make a question of maintaining slavery, a question of morals, and do we actually want to actually profit off of slaves?"

Note: Dorsey Nunn wrote a book about his experiences advocating for the rights of former prison inmates titled, "What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection." With about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire. For more, read about America's dystopian "pay-to-stay" incarceration system.


COVID guidelines caused millions to suffer. Now Fauci admits 'there was no science behind it.'
June 5, 2024, USA Today
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/06/05/fauci...

In his testimony to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday ... Dr. Anthony Fauci told members of Congress that the COVID guidelines he preached in 2020 had no scientific support. These disclosures are damning and maddening for all of us who had structured our lives around these rules for years. As a result, millions of people suffered needlessly. He also admitted in the January interview that there was little science that backed requiring children to wear masks. The real effect of social distancing − which Fauci basically admitted Monday and in January's testimony was just an educated guess on how to deter COVID-19 − devastated America's economy, small businesses and families. For what? Closing schools was devastating to kids. Pandemic closings resulted in two decades of learning loss. Anxiety and depression skyrocketed, especially among adolescents and teens. The real effect of social distancing ... devastated America's economy, small businesses and families. In the second quarter of 2020, 1.2 million jobs were destroyed. In June 2021, 6.2 million people did not work at all or worked fewer hours because their employers closed or lost business. Family-owned businesses were lost, savings wiped, all for rules that had no real scientific basis. On Monday, Fauci did concede that some COVID-19 preventative measures may have gone too far and led to harmful outcomes.

Note: Fauci was literally the highest paid federal employee within the US government, even higher than the president. Yet while he told the world that attacking him is attacking science, he lied about funding risky gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. In hearings earlier this year, he said “I don’t recall” over 100 times when asked important information on his role in COVID and pandemic policies. What does this say about our public health leaders?


In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that.
June 2, 2024, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/02/six-foot-rule-covid...

Elinore McCance-Katz, the Trump administration’s assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, was urging the CDC to justify its recommendation that Americans stay six feet apart to avoid contracting covid-19 — or get rid of it. “I very much hope that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I have been able to find online,” McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo submitted to the CDC and other health agency leaders. The CDC would keep its six-foot social distance recommendation in place until August 2022. There was little science behind the six-foot rule. “It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.” Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation. The U.S. distancing measure was particularly stringent, as other countries adopted shorter distances; the World Health Organization set a distance of one meter, or slightly more than three feet, which experts concluded was roughly as effective as the six-foot mark at deterring infections, and would have allowed schools to reopen more rapidly.

Note: Fauci was literally the highest paid federal employee within the US government, even higher than the president. Yet while he told the world that attacking him is attacking science, he lied about funding risky gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. In hearings earlier this year, he said “I don’t recall” over 100 times when asked important information on his role in COVID and pandemic policies. What does this say about our public health leaders?


NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide
June 2, 2024, New York Post
https://nypost.com/2024/06/02/opinion/nih-scientists-made-710m...

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists. Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists. Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions. Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: Those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior 12 combined. All told, it’s $1.036 billion. NIH is still redacting pieces of the data that would help us more easily connect therapeutics with their government-paid inventors. For example, they refuse to show us the amount of royalties paid to each individual scientist. So we still can’t entirely follow the money. In the meantime, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has sponsored the Royalty Transparency Act, which sailed unanimously through the committee process and deserves a floor vote immediately.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry from reliable major media sources.


1 in 9 children now diagnosed with this ‘expanding health concern’
May 23, 2024, New York Post
https://nypost.com/2024/05/23/lifestyle/1-in-9-us-children-diagnosed-with-adhd/

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals a staggering uptick in ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, diagnoses among American children. Calling ADHD an “expanding public health concern,” researchers found that 1 in 9 children aged 3-17 had been diagnosed with the disorder, symptoms of which include trouble paying attention, overactivity and impulsive behaviors. The study, which appears in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, found that between 2016 and 2022, ADHD diagnoses among kids jumped by more than one million. Melissa Danielson, a statistician with the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, attributes the increase to the mental toll of the pandemic. The report found that nearly 78% percent of children diagnosed with ADHD had at least one other diagnosed disorder. Common among these additional diagnoses were behavioral or conduct problems, anxiety, developmental delays, autism and/or depression. Meanwhile, an unrelated study found that between 2000 and 2021, the number of calls to US poison control centers for children’s ADHD medication errors jumped 300%, and a University of Michigan study revealed that 1 in 4 middle and high school students are abusing stimulants prescribed for ADHD. Additionally, ADHD medications are known to cause side effects like headache and loss of appetite.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mental health from reliable major media sources.


Hunter Biden is being hounded by truth and justice – and he only has his repeated lies to blame
May 22, 2024, New York Post
https://nypost.com/2024/05/22/opinion/hunter-biden-is-being-hounded...

Hunter Biden was hit with a double whammy Wednesday. First, a new filing by the prosecution in his upcoming gun-felony trial in Delaware poured scorn on Hunter’s legal team’s bizarrely persistent denial that his laptop and its contents are authentic. Then IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler delivered 100 pages of new bombshell evidence showing Hunter lied repeatedly to investigators in his sworn congressional testimony in February, prompting House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith to raise the prospect of perjury charges against the first son. Shapley also produced a document that adds further weight to the suspicion that Hunter’s “sugar brother” ... Kevin Morris, was under CIA protection. Hunter lied about his shakedown WhatsApp message to CEFC employee Raymond Zhao on July 30, 2017, said Smith, when his committee voted to publicly release the new whistleblower documents. “These documents make clear that Hunter Biden was using his father’s name to shake down a Chinese businessman — and it worked. And when confronted by congressional investigators about it, he lied,” the panel said. The CIA’s shadowy hand can be seen elsewhere in the Hunter Biden story, including in the rapid approval of the “Dirty 51” letter signed by 51 former intelligence operatives (mainly from the CIA) before the 2020 election that falsely claimed that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


‘I don’t know how this happened’: A $3B secret program undermining Biden’s tech policy
May 24, 2024, Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/23/3-billion-secret-program...

In recent weeks, Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been taking victory laps for the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, a law intended to create jobs and fund innovation in a key global industry. It has already launched a series of grants, incentives and research proposals to help America regain its cutting-edge status in global semiconductor manufacturing. But quietly, in a March spending bill, appropriators in Congress shifted $3.5 billion that the Commerce Department was hoping to use for those grants and pushed it into a separate Pentagon program called Secure Enclave, which is not mentioned in the original law. The diversion of money from a flagship Biden initiative is a case study in how fragile Washington’s monumental spending programs can be in practice. Several members of Congress involved in the CHIPS law say they were taken by surprise to see the money shifted to Secure Enclave, a classified project to build chips in a special facility for defense and intelligence needs. Critics say the shift in CHIPS money undermines an important policy by moving funds from a competitive public selection process meant to boost a domestic industry to an untried and classified project likely to benefit only one company. No company has been named yet to execute the project, but interviews reveal that chipmaking giant Intel lobbied for its creation, and is still considered the frontrunner for the money.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Inspiring Articles


The all-female patrol guarding Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest
May 7, 2024, BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240503-the-indigenous-women...

It is the break of dawn in the Serena community, in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Elsa Cerda, a 43-year-old indigenous Kichwa woman, brews guayusa leaves – a native plant from the rainforest – in a pot. It marks the start of the Guayusa Upina, a ritual performed by Amazonian indigenous peoples before beginning their daily activities. This tradition is more than a routine; it's a spiritual connection to their ancestral roots. As the first rays of light begin to filter through the tree canopy, a diverse assembly of 35 women, ranging from 23 to 85 years old, arrives one by one at the ceremony. The group goes by the name of "Yuturi Warmi". Their role as Amazonian guardians involves safeguarding the territory from pollution and preserving the land and rivers from activities that jeopardise biodiversity – such as deforestation and mining operations. The women undergo regular training sessions, with younger women teaching older members how to operate these phone cameras and drones. Each patrol involves a rotation of members, particularly the younger ones, who primarily patrol the land, ensuring continued presence and surveillance. The women do not carry any weapons, relying instead on their collective presence to act as a deterrent. In the event of witnessing illegal mining activities, the women prioritise non-violent measures such as contacting the authorities and gathering evidence.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing the Earth.


How Electric Harps Are Protecting Honey Bees
May 23, 2024, Reasone to be Cheerful
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/electric-harps-protect-honey-bees...

Michel Costa had become a frustrated veteran of an obscure yet devastating war in Europe. The enemy: invasive Asian hornets, which had been massacring his honey bees. When Costa, a retiree and avid beekeeper, discovered a new weapon with the potential to change the course of the entire war, he was intrigued. Several companies had begun selling so-called “electric harps,” which they claimed could kill the hornets in droves by electrocuting them as they flew through. Although the harps take different forms, each one is made of some sort of large frame, which is then “strung” with conductive metal wires. These are then connected to a source of electricity, often solar panels, so that the wires conduct simultaneously positive and negative charges. When a hornet flies through, its wings touch the wires on either side, completing a circuit, and thereby delivering a fatal current of electricity. Beekeepers then place the harps around their hives in positions along the hornets’ frequent flight paths. The harps can reduce predation pressure by 89 percent — enough to give hives the chance to replenish their stores. In one study only 56 percent of unprotected hives survived through winter, while 78 percent of those protected by harps did. Harps are also cheaper than other methods for beekeepers to install and operate. Beekeepers can buy them in complete kits that cost around $300 ... as Costa did. When combined with solar panels, maintenance costs are minimal.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing the Earth.


‘The tranquility frees you’: Bogotá, the city that shuts out cars every week
May 30, 2024, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/30/the...

Once a week the citizens of Bogotá take back the streets of their city. Every Sunday, between 7am and 2pm, many of the biggest roads are shut to cars and left open to bikes, skates and feet. “Ciclovía is really cool because there is a lot more space for us,” says seven-year-old Oliver Rojas, who is out cycling with his parents and is baffled to hear that this innovative scheme does not exist in the rest of the world. The weekly event was born out of a one-day protest in 1974 against cars taking over the world’s streets. It now covers 127 km (79 miles) of streets in the city and, on average, 1.5 million Bogotanos use the Ciclovía every Sunday. It has spread to most other Colombian cities and has been copied by mayors across the world, from Buenos Aires to Bengaluru, who hope the initiative can help get people in shape, improve mental health, reduce car usage and help fight climate change in the way that it has in Colombia. Part of the attraction is the fun and the family-friendly atmosphere. Bogotá’s cycleways are punctuated with aerobics classes, people selling fresh juices, and the sound of salsa. On a regular weekday, the level of PM 2.5 particles on the main road through Bogotá ... is dangerously high at 65 µg/m3. During Ciclovía, however, that number falls to 5 µg/m3 on the same stretch of road – 13 times less and in line with the WHO’s recommendations for the tiny, harmful particles. Noise levels are seven times lower.

Note: Read about the successful story of a US community that banned cars.


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