Longtime Washington Post editor Robert Ames Alden died at age 87 in June, leaving an inspiring leadership legacy in journalistic and other civic affairs. Of particular note here, he was one of five founding directors of the Justice Integrity Project (JIP) a decade ago and provided active encouragement and other support until his final illness. 

He died on June 1 at his home in McLean, Virginia, from what his widow, Diane Alden, described as complications from Alzheimer's.

He retired from the Washington Post in 2000 after more than 48 years as an editor, making him the longest-serving editor in the paper’s history until that point and one who had been personally involved in some of its more notable coverage.

As night news editor in 1963, for example, he put together the Post's first extra edition since Pearl Harbor to cover the assassination of President Kennedy. As world news editor in 1974, Alden was the principal architect for the layout of the Post’s coverage of the resignation of President Nixon.

Alden is shown in Washington Post photo at right by Marie Marzi.

Culminating a seven-year effort in 1975, he co-founded and later led the National Press Foundation to improve journalism education. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was the leading advocate among National Press Club members for the admission of women into the Club, where he served as president in 1976.

Toward the end of a 1984 appearance on C-SPAN, he showed a mock souvenir edition of the Post that highlighted his leadership as Club president, among other career highlights to that point. The main headline extolled his "persistence."

The first native Washingtonian to lead the Press Club, he began his career as a sportswriter for the Cleveland Press in 1947. He helped innovate the use of more statistics in baseball coverage (think of the category RBI: runs batted in) and was an award-winning writer.

Also, he was a visionary community leader in planning a town green, central park, library, outdoor stage, community center and theater for McLean, VA, whose Alden Theatre now carries his name in recognition of his volunteer service.

Alden, shown at left in a 1959 Washington Post photo, earned bachelor and master’s degrees from the George Washington University, where he won the university's top history award as a student for 17 years in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 2005, university officials bestowed a distinguished alumnus award and described Alden as “a living legend” in Washington journalism.

This editor attended that ceremony with him after meeting him the previous evening at the Press Club bar, where he had exercised his raconteur's gift to describe his encounters with the great and near great through the decades, including such officials as Lyndon Johnson, heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano, and film stars Gary Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor.

In early 2010, Alden joined with four others (former U.S. Navy captain and businessman Ron Fisher, and former White House correspondents John Kelly and John Edward Hurley, plus this editor) in co-founding the Justice Integrity Project to investigate complex, under-covered news stories of importance. The bios, one of the most heavily read sections on this website, are here.

Our initial focus was on politically motivated federal prosecutions and similar actions by the U.S. Justice Department involving issues of unwarranted secret pressures. One controversy then was the "U.S. attorney firing scandal," whereby eight and by some counts nine presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys were fired because they acted ethically -- in refusal to use their regional criminal powers either to bring dubious cases against political targets or to protect friends of the president and his advisors.

Such cases are again much in the news, as evident in the controversies surrounding Attorney General William Barr and such defendants as Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen and such forced-out officials as FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and recently ousted New York U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Berman, below at right. Berman was head of New York's Southern District, which holds broad jurisdiction over Wall Street and many of President Trump's interests, supporters and several high profile suspected criminal confederates. 

At the outset of our project a decade ago, one such case arose out of the U.S. attorney firing scandal was the longstanding federal corruption investigation of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. He had been his state's most popular Democrat. He became a target by Alabama Republicans in the state attorney general's office from the first month that he assumed office in 1999. It was no coincidence that Bush senior advisor Karl Rove was pressuring the Justice Department personnel to use their powers for political purposes after Rove had been a consultant to Alabama business interests during their successful 1990s effort to flip the state's supreme court from all-Democrat to all-Republican.

Siegelman underwent relentless prosecution on dubious corruption charges ramped up during the Bush presidency beginnning in 2001. The core charge against Siegelman was that he had founded a foundation before his governorship to advocate for better K-12 funding in Alabama and that he had reappointed businessman Richard Scrushy, a donor to the foundation, to a state board on which the Republican Scrushy was already serving under previous Republican governors. 

The result? A seven-year sentence imposed on both defendants after Siegelman's second trial despite massive evidence including whistleblower revelations that the prosecution had been hoked up to remove him from elective politics, particularly because of his planned re-election campaign in 2006. 

Alden provided vital advice to the project on that story, which was published May 2009 as front page exclusive by the Huffington Post under the title Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows.  Another headline, $300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company, pointed the way to the trial judge's conflict of interest and likely financial corruption, both factors that helped explain the vast number of irregularities in the prosecution and courtroom procedures.

Our project, JIP, published scores of stories on the Siegelman / Scrushy case that generating many hundreds of thousands of page views. Among the headlines were: 

• Siegelman's Judge Accused Of Beating Wife, Affair With Clerk
• Wife-Beating Siegelman Judge Resigns, Ends Horrid Career With Civic Lesson 
• Alabama Judicial Scandal Could Taint Many Cases, Not Just Siegelman's 

Conservative majorities in the Wisconsin and U.S. Supreme Courts ruled separately on Monday to rig the April 7 elections in Wisconsin with the effect — and doubtless the intention — of helping Republicans win the presidential swing state and retain control of the state legislature by stifling Democratic votes in November.

Under the cover of a global Covid-19 pandemic, the decisions by the high federal and state courts this week forced many Wisconsin voters, especially those in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, to choose between risking their lives and exercising their right to vote.

Although judges knew these cruel high stakes from their briefing materials, few other Americans realize that a key reason for the needless risk-taking in Wisconsin was because an ultra-conservative Wisconsin justice, Dan Kelly (below at left) was on the ballot for a 10-year term.

Both state and national Republicans want Kelly's election-rigging skills to remain on the Wisconsin court so that it can continue its national leadership in using a pretense of legality to justify election thefts far into the future.

Legislative control is especially important during the once-every-10-year census in 2020 because the census results trigger the power for state legislatures to gerrymander congressional and legislative districts for the next decade.

Donald Trump, the impeached president, is desperate to remain in unaccountable power. He has successfully stalled congressional scrutiny mandated by the Constitution and long precedents, in part because friendly Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court have stayed indefinitely the most significant lower-court rulings about his finances and allegations of his obstruction of justice. The court refuses to hear arguments on these vital cases, claiming the pandemic prevents its work, even while it needlessly forced Wisconsin voters to risk their lives by in-person voting at crowded polling places instead of availing themselves of absentee ballots. 

In same spirit of stacking the courts at the state level, Trump has used his national broadcast pandemic news conferences and his Twitter feed to urge support for Kelly, as reported by Fox News (Trump makes last-minute push for Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. Kelly ran in a "non-partisan" election against lower court state Judge Jill Karofsky (shown at right of Kelly).

Trump's Election Day Tweet (shown below) sought to fool voters by suggesting that gun rights is the big issue. Insiders know that Republicans want Kelly for voter suppression and other election rigging.

With the current financial and news crunch, few mass media outlets provide enough coverage of regional politics and courts anymore to describe, much less thwart, nefarious schemes that unfold in Wisconsin and elsewhere under the veneer of legitimate, good-faith litigation.

Furthermore, few reporters and their outlets dare to ascribe in blunt, understandable terms the apparent motives of supreme court judges, federal or national, who are typically accorded great deference as eminences even when their skulduggery and conflicts are obvious.    

Ten years ago, the Justice Integrity Project was founded to expose prosecutorial and judicial corruption of this kind.

The sinister actions of these judges deserve not just exposure, but effective follow-up to ensure whatever accountability the increasingly broken American constitutional system can muster.

The numbers tell the basic story. Donald John Trump — the name of the impeached president that should deservedly appear on indictments once his criminal regime is ended — learned from U.S. intelligence channels the threat posed by China's coronavirus on Jan. 3, with a more thorough briefing on Jan. 22.

He thwarted testing and other health safety preparations. That way, he could fool the public and help bolster the stock market and jobs reports that are vital to his re-election campaign.

As of March 1, meanwhile, the United States reported just 89 cases of coronavirus because of the difficulties of testing and other lack of federal action to warn the public.

One month later, on April 1, some 211,000 cases were reported in the United States.

By the end of this week, the New York Times was reporting that figure as more than 300,000 U.S. cases, causing more than 8,000 deaths. More than 3,500 of those deaths have occurred in New York State amidst a crisis in the availability of vital medical and protective equipment, the Times reported.

By Monday, April 6, it was nearly 11,000, with experts saying failure to test suggested even higher totals that will never be known!

A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.

Update: The New York Times reported on April 6 more specifically, that Trump's trade adviser Petter Navarro advised him in January that the U.S. death toll could be a half-million Americans: Risk of Worst-Case Scenario ‘Should Not Be Overlooked,’ Memo Warned by Maggie Haberman.

The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.

Mr. Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.

But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.

In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.

The withheld medical equipment, part of a pattern whereby Trump suggested that federal stockpiles would be allocated on the basis which state governors were "appreciative" and otherwise nice to him.

That raises well-founded suspicions that Trump and his team led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner are once again using federal resources to benefit his re-election campaign, financial cronies and foreign dictator allies.

In Trump to Governors: I’d Like You to Do Us a Favor, Though, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, right, drew an apt parallel to the Trump crime gang's use of $400 million in congressionally allocated military aid approved for Ukraine's defense last summer.

The purpose of witholding the life-saving military aid in violation of law and government policy?

To try to extort the announcement of a seeming bogus "investigation" by Ukraine of front-running Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, the latter accused of obtaining directors' fees from a board of a Ukrainian energy company, according to many courageous impeachment witnesses. They testified before the House despite threats against them that deterred more craven administration witnesses who refused to cooperate.

“There are a lot of parallels between the president’s behavior now and during the whole Ukraine scandal,” she quoted Representative Adam Schiff, left, the California Democrat who led Trump’s impeachment prosecution, as telling her. “Certainly the most apparent is his demand that the governors basically pay fealty to him, praise him, or they’ll suffer consequences.”

Trump's extortion attempt against Ukraine formed the basis of the House impeachment of Trump in January before his acquittal by Senate Republican loyalists. Some of those voting for acquittal, most notably Maine Republican Susan Collins, claimed in essence that they could acquit Trump without hearing evidence because he had learned his "lesson" via House proceedings and would not again violate his Constitutional oath and the public interest.

That's obviously wrong, as indicated by, among other things, the U.S. death toll and Trump's unceasing efforts to leverage his presidential powers during the pandemic for personal and partisan gain.

The Boston Globe summed up the Trump team's shocking behavior in an April 1 editorial entitled, A president unfit for a pandemic. The subtitles were "Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has blood on his hands."

In the early stages of what should have been preparations by Trump, his administration and Congress to safeguard the public, at least two prominent GOP U.S. senators dumped millions of dollars of stocks in apparent insider trading during mid-February.

They were Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina and Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, whose husband Jeffrey Sprecher chairs the New York Stock Exchange. This was after the two heard U.S. intelligence confidential briefings about the dangers the virus posed to the public and markets. They enriched themselves and failed to warn their constituents and the rest of the nation.

Remarkably, the corrupt actions of the two Trump defenders during impeachment occurred soon after the prison sentencing of Trump's first two congressional supporters from his 2016 presidential campaign, Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California. In separate cases, Collins and Hunter received long prison terms for insider trading and illegal use of campaign funds for personal expenses, respectively, with Hunter's case involving large purchases of prostitution services.

Our Justice Integrity Project has sought to cover these many horrific developments and scandals by extensive daily news summaries, segmented into monthly installments, as here.

The virus conflicts and their ripple effects keeping growing, as in the HuffPost story April 4 headlined, HuffPost via Yahoo News, Trump Org Reportedly Seeking Debt Help From Deutsche As Bank Is Probed By DOJ.

In the meantime, we have reduced our output of opinion columns.

But there comes a time to pull the materials together into larger themes. The numbers and the illustrative images tell much of the story. So does a daily listing of Trump's own words, particularly during the early part of the pandemic when he somehow thought he could get away with conning the public into thinking there would be no serious health problem.

He lied. Americans died, as did untold thousands more around  the world in a crisis of leadership fostered by many like-minded dictators and cover-up artists.

But those horrific results haven't stopped Trump from a new round of conning the public with his daily White House press briefings, by which he apparently seeks to replicate his successes on the fake reality show "The Apprentice" and at his "Make America Great Again Rallies."

Last week, Trump claimed that he will be vindicated if the U.S. death toll is simply the 100,000 to 240,000 his team foresees if things go well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump's protector, falsely claimed that Trump was too preoccuppied with impeachment to focus on the virus.

That's false since McConnell ensured by thwarting witnesses and exercising iron control over fellow Republicans that impeachment was essentially over by the end January. Trump meanwhile undertook many golf outings, campaign rallies and fund-raising events with cronies.

Washington psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, who has treated many high-ranking official over his four decades of practice and has authored books profiling the mental state of recent presidents, two weeks ago warned that Sociopath Trump could see dead bodies from coronavirus and step over them.

The future is always murky, but not so the recent past: The man is a liar who is criminally negligent in the deaths already of thousands.

"I give you the President of the United States," wrote blogger Paul Maraschino in providing the research findings below:

Trump's response to the coronavirus (his words):

January 22: We have it to totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.

February 2: We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.

February 24: The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

February 25: CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.

February 25: I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.

February 26: The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.

February 26: We're going very substantially down, not up.

February 27: One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

February 28: We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.

March 2: You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?

March 2: A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.

March 4: If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.

March 5: I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.

March 5: The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!

March 6: I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.

March 6: Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.

March 6: I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.

March 6: I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.

March 8: We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.

March 9: This blindsided the world.

March 9: The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the coronavirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.

March 10: It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.

March 13: National Emergency Declaration

March 13: No, I don’t take responsibility at all.

The larger context includes Trump's dismantling in 2018 of the White House office created through the years to address the dangers of pandemics.

Important also is his administration's relentless war in Congress, courts and state legislatures to abolish the 2009 Affordable Care Act (ACA, sometimes called "Obamacare") without presenting a substitute, thereby putting tens of millions of American lives at risk -- especially during a pandemic.

All of this is part of what commentator Robert Harrington described on April 5 as This is the moment that contempt for science comes home to roost.

Among the many tragic ironies of our current American situation is that George Conway III, right, an activist conservative lawyer and husband of Trump's acerbic counselor Kellyanne Conway, has been recently leading public warnings against the president and his danger to society.

Citing the famous language of the Republican Senator Howard Baker during Watergate as the Tennessee senator geared up to protect the Constitution, Conway and a co-author asked in the Washington Post last month:  What did Trump and Congress know about the coronavirus, and when did they know it? 

According to a Post report, they wrote, quite possibly a lot, and for quite a while: Intelligence agencies 'were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat.'

They continued:

These intelligence assessments about the global danger posed by the virus made the rounds in the executive and legislative branches, sources told The Post, but the American people weren’t told about them. Now Americans should know precisely what their government knew about an impending crisis that would jeopardize their livelihoods and lives.

These reports should be declassified, to the maximum extent feasible, and released as soon as possible, along with the identities of senior administration officials and members of Congress who learned of it. That’s especially true given how Trump repeatedly told the public that the impact of the virus on the United States would be minimal.

That's in the future, we can only hope. We already know plenty.

Introduction: The Justice Integrity Project presents an important guest column below, “WTC 7 Not Destroyed by Fire Concludes Final University of Alaska Fairbanks Report.” It summarizes a four-year research study announced on March 25 undermining the conclusions of the U.S. government about what caused the collapse of Building 7 at the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks in New York's lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

The primary author of the report is Dr. Leroy Hulsey, the much-honored chairman of the Department of Engineering and Mines at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The research was initiated with support by the more than three thousand members of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth ("AE911Truth"), led by Richard Gage, AIA, and supplemented by years of crowd-sourced fundraising. Donations for more outreach may be made here.

As professionals in building construction, AE911Truth members have argued that the cause of the collapses of Building 7 and two other World Trade Center Towers at nearly free-fall rates needs to be determined without doubt because these are the only three steel-framed high-rises in world history alleged to have collapsed because of fire.

Building 7 has attracted special attention through the years by researchers who doubt official accounts because the building was not hit by an airplane and collapsed suddenly, in about seven seconds, without visible serious fires and more than seven hours after other buildings fell down.

Other groups, researchers and concerned citizens have focused also on larger historical implications of the 9/11 attacks, including the ongoing U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

In view of these lingering questions and their implications, the Justice Integrity Project's editor has served on the national advisory committee of the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, which under the leadership of President David Meiswinkle and Litigation Director Mick Harrison works cooperatively with AE911Truth and victim families.     

By Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

The destruction of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 in New York City late in the afternoon of September 11, 2001, was not a result of fires, according to the much-anticipated final report issued today [on March 25] by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).

The UAF team’s findings, which were the result of a four-year computer modeling study of the tower’s collapse, contradict those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which concluded in a 2008 report that WTC 7 was the first tall building ever to collapse primarily due to fire.

“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused the observed collapse,” said Professor Leroy Hulsey, right, the study’s principal investigator. “The only way it could have fallen in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column.”

“The only way it could have fallen in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column.”

— Professor Leroy Hulsey

The four-year study was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization representing more than 3,000 architects and engineers who have signed the organization’s petition calling for a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

“We are proud to have supported the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Professor Leroy Hulsey in conducting a genuinely scientific study into the reasons for this building’s collapse,” said Richard Gage, president and founder of AE911Truth. “It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.”

AE911Truth and its allies among the 9/11 victims’ families will now use the findings in the report as part of a formal “request for correction” that the group plans to submit to NIST in the coming days. “The indisputable errors documented in our request for correction will give NIST no way out of correcting its deeply flawed report and reversing its conclusion that fires were the cause of the collapse,” said Gage.

“It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.” — Richard Gage, AIA

The final report, entitled A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 – Final Report, includes clarifications and supplemental text based on public comments submitted in response to a draft report released by UAF and AE911Truth on September 3, 2019.

The UAF team’s final report is the result of an extensive four-year computer modeling effort that was followed by a robust peer review process. The peer review included dozens of public comments as well as external review by two independent experts, Dr. Gregory Szuladzinski of Analytical Service Company, a leading expert in structural mechanics and finite element modeling, and Dr. Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.

“I am grateful to everyone who supported or participated in this study in any way,” said Professor Hulsey. “We hope that our findings will be carefully looked at by the building community and spur further investigation into how this building came down on that tragic day.”

The Hulsey report and supporting materials can be found on UAF’s Institute of Northern Engineering website and on the AE911Truth website.

Richard Gage (shown at left on one of the most downloaded C-SPAN program in its history) and civil engineer Roland Angle held a live virtual presentation on March 26, 2020 to outline the findings contained in the final report.

United States mainstream news coverage of the current U.S.-Iran-Iraq crisis is extensive yet still overlooks almost entirely important factors necessary for public understanding of the developments regarding the U.S. drone assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, right.

Our survey below of recent developments highlights those factors. For context, it also provides excerpts and links about the crisis drawn from major Western news organizations and from one alternative source.

The CIA-led overthrow in 1953 of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (sometimes spelled "Mossadeq"), shown at left, was the first of these overlooked factors, both in terms of importance and chronology.

Commentaries on the current crisis published by Western outlets typically begin their analysis with the date 1979, when religion-inspired Iranian revolutionaries seized 52 American hostages in the course of overthrowing the Shah Mohammad Reza Pavlavi, the cruel and arrogant "King of Kings" that U.S. and British intelligence agents had installed in 1953 to replace the leftist Mosaddegh, who was imprisoned and died in 1967 in exile. The shah and his wife are shown below at right as they fled Iran in 1979 for protection and his medical treatment in the United States.

To report only on the 1979 Iranian reaction to the 1953 coup without mentioning the shah's Western-imposed reign and 1979 protection from accountability confuses the public. That kind of omission is replicated in other "overlooked" factors below, which tend to involve controversial U.S. actions and allegations that officials prefer to ignore, as do most news organizations.

The Justice Integrity Project provides a list of these other overlooked factors below: They are:

• 1953 Overthrow of Mosaddegh
• October Surprise Claims Regarding 1980 U.S. election and hostage release
• Iran-Iraq War 1980-89
• Responsibility for 2001 9/11 Attacks
• WMD Claims Prompting 2003 U.S.-led Iraq invasion
• Irani-led efforts to defeat their arch-enemy ISIS and Al Qaeda jihadists funded by, among others, Saudi Arabia and Qatar

Further below is a roundup of news coverage by date of current developments during the past week. This coverage includes a number of outstanding reports and commentaries by major news organizations, especially the New York Times and Washington Post. In other words, our criticism of a pattern of omissions and missed judgments does not negate the value of what is published in most circumstances.

We include also in our news roundup below selected alternative, foreign and independent media.

For example, the Wayne Madsen Report, published by author and former Navy Intelligence officer and NSA analyst Wayne Madsen, below left, provided this summary on Jan. 6 entitled Soleimani's Revenge of the death toll from the U.S. strike. Soleimani's car is shown at right. Madsen's description below was a prelude to his detailed description of battle-hardened allies from around the world that Iran can call upon for revenge against the U.S. military:

Killed, along with Soleimani (also sometimes spelled "Suleimani") in the U.S. attack on their vehicle within Baghdad International Airport was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the Iraqi Shi’a Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), also known as the Hashed al-Shabi. Al-Muhandis was also the founder of Kataib Hezbollah, which is part of the PMF. The PMF serves as a virtual Iraqi National Guard, with Shi’a, Sunni, Yazidi, Christian, and Iraqi Turkmen components.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took the unusual step of declaring the IRGC and the Quds Force “foreign terrorist organizations” last year. The designation had only been applied to non-state entities in the past. Hours after the strike on Soleimani and Al-Muhandis, the State Department declared the Iraqi Shi’a militia group and political party, Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), a foreign terrorist organization.

Almost simultaneous to the designation of AAH, two leaders of AAH -- Qais al-Khazali and his brother, Laith al-Khazali -- were targeted in a further U.S. missile attack on their convoy in north Baghdad.

The two militia leaders and other passengers in their convoy were reportedly killed, an act that further inflamed passions in the region, particularly in Iran and among Iraq’s majority Shi’a population.

Madsen's column on Jan. 7, News on the Iran crisis the corporate media is largely ignoring, led off with: "The Trump administration, in violation of the 1947 United Nations-United States UN Headquarters Agreement, denied Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, right, a visa to attend a January 9 meeting of the UN Security Council in New York to condemn the American assassination of Iranian Quds Force Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3."

Three conferences in the Dallas Metro area this month will convene JFK assassination researchers on overlapping dates in recognition of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in the city on Nov. 22, 1963. He is shown delivering his iconic speech earlier that year at American University calling for world peace as a top priority.

First, beginning on Thursday, Nov. 21, is the four-day JFK Dallas Conference at the Doubletree Market Center (2015 Market Center Blvd.), organized by Trine Day book publisher Kris Millegan and one of his authors, Judyth Vary Baker.

Among the other scheduled speakers among the forensic physicians, public safety experts, attorneys, authors, professors and witnesses populating the speaker programs of all three conferences are" Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, Robert Tanenbaum, Ed Haslam, Dick Russell, Edgar Tatro, Roger Craig, Jr., Chris Fulton, Dr. John D. Williams, David Denton, Damon Ise, Hugh Clark, Dr. Mal Hyman, Vincent Palamara, Robert Groden, Barbara Honeggar, Gary Shaw and Ryan M. Jones. Highlights include an awards banquet. Details are here:

Beginning on Friday, Nov. 22 is a two-day November in Dallas conference organized by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) in cooperation with JFK Lancer Productions and held at the new Marriott Courtyard hotel (310 South Houston Street).

Among scheduled speakers are Oliver Stone, John Curington, Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, David Denton, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. David Mantik, James DiEugenio, James Wagenvoord, Russ Baker, Dr. John Newman, Bill Kelly, Dan Storper and Bill Simpich. The conference will feature a mock Court of Inquiry (with Judge Jay Karahan, retired, as the presiding judge), a banquet and an archivists' panel that includes Stephen Fagin, John Slate, Mary Goolsby, Britney Crawford, David Knight, and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen. Details are here.

Sunday, Nov. 24 is the date for the one-day JFK: The Continuing Inquiry conference in Mansfield (located just south of Dallas) organized by Chris Gallop. The event will be at the at the Dirty Job Brewing, 117 N. Main Street, Mansfield from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Among speakers will be Bill Simpich, Roger Craig Jr., Hank Slaughter, Steve Cameron, Jr., Gary Shaw and Dr. Michael Marcades. Details on Facebook: JFK: The Continuing Inquiry here.

Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, a board member of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee studying the death, plans to attend as much of the three conferences as possible, including a meeting of other Truth and Reconciliation board members and supporters.