In America, we commonly think of press freedom and censorship in terms of the First Amendment, which focuses attention on the press itself and limits on the power of government to restrict it. But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in the aftermath of World War II, presents a broader framework. Article 19 reads:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. By highlighting the right to receive information and ideas, Article 19 makes it clear that press freedom is about everyone in society, not just the press, and that government censorship is only one potential way of thwarting that right. That’s the perspective that has informed Project Censored from the beginning, more than 40 years ago.

In the top 10 stories, three main themes clearly seem evident: first, threats to public health, second, threats to democracy, both at home and abroad and third, an out-of-control military.

But don’t let this overview pattern blind you to other patterns you may see for yourself. Even individual stories often involve different overlapping patterns – environmental destruction and an out-of-control military in No. 7, for example, or public health and infrastructure concerns in No. 1. These patterns don’t just connect problems and issues, they connect people, communities and potential solutions as well. A shared understanding of the patterns that hold us down and divide us is the key to developing better patterns to live by together. With that thought in mind, here is Project Censored’s Top 10 list for 2016-17:

1. Widespread lead contamination threatens children’s health and could triple household water bills

After President Barack Obama declared a federal emergency in Flint, Michigan, based on lead contamination of the city’s water supply in January 2016, Reuters reporters M.B. Pell and Joshua Schneyer began an investigation of lead contamination nationwide with shocking results. In June 2016 they reported that although many states and Medicaid rules require blood lead tests for young children, millions of children were not being tested. In December 2016, they reported on the highly decentralized data they had been able to assemble from 21 states, showing that 2,606 census tracts and 278 ZIP codes across the United States had levels of lead poisoning more than double the rates found in Flint at the peak of its contamination crisis. Of those, 1,100 communities had lead contamination rates “at least four times higher” than Flint.

In Flint, 5 percent of the children screened high blood lead levels. Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2.5 percent of all U.S. children younger than six – about 500,000 children – have elevated blood lead levels.

But Pell and Schneyer’s neighborhood focus allowed them to identify local hotspots “whose lead poisoning problems may be obscured in broader surveys,” such as those focused on statewide or countywide rates. They found them in communities that “stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, ... where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning.”

In January 2017, Schneyer and Pell reported that, based on their previous investigation, “From California to Pennsylvania, local leaders, health officials and researchers are advancing measures to protect children from the toxic threat. They include more blood-lead screening, property inspections, hazard abatement and community outreach programs.”

But there’s a deeper infrastructure problem involved, as Farron Cousins reported for DeSmogBlog in January 2017. “Lead pipes are time bombs” and water contamination is to be expected, Cousins wrote. The U.S. relies on an estimated 1.2 million miles of lead pipes for municipal delivery of drinking water, and much of this aging infrastructure is reaching or has exceeded its lifespan.

In 2012 the American Water Works Association estimated that a complete overhaul of the nation’s aging water systems would require an investment of $1 trillion over the next 25 years, which could triple household water bills.

2. Over $6 trillion in unaccountable Army spending

In 1996, Congress passed legislation requiring all government agencies to undergo annual audits, but a July 2016 report by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Army alone has accumulated $6.5 trillion in expenditures that can’t be accounted for over the past two decades.

As Dave Lindorff reported for This Can’t Be Happening!, the DoD “has not been tracking or recording or auditing all of the taxpayer money allocated by Congress – what it was spent on, how well it was spent or where the money actually ended up.” But the Army wasn’t alone. “Things aren’t any better at the Navy, Air Force and Marines,” he added.

The report appeared at a time when “politicians of both major political parties are demanding accountability for every penny spent on welfare.... Ditto for people receiving unemployment compensation,” Lindorff wrote. Politicians have also engaged in pervasive efforts “to make teachers accountable for student ‘performance,’” he added. Yet, he observed, “the military doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of spending ... even though Congress fully a generation ago passed a law requiring such accountability.”

3. Pentagon paid PR firm in United Kingdom for fake Al-Qaeda videos

Concern over Russian involvement in promoting fake news during the 2016 election is a justified hot topic in the news. But what about our own involvement in similar operations? In October 2016, Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding- Smith reported for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on one such very expensive – and questionable – operation. The Pentagon paid a British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, more than $660 million to run a top-secret propaganda program in Iraq from at least 2006 to December 2011. The work consisted of three types of products: TV commercials portraying al-Qaeda in a negative light, news items intended to look like Arabic TV, and – most disturbing – fake al- Qaeda propaganda films.

A former Bell Pottinger video editor, Martin Wells, told the Bureau that he was given precise instructions for production of fake al-Qaeda films, and that the firm’s output was approved by former General David Petraeus – the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq – and on occasion by the White House. They reported that the United States used contractors because “the military didn’t have the in-house expertise and was operating in a legal ‘grey area.’” The reporters “traced the firm’s Iraq work through U.S. army contracting censuses, federal procurement transaction records and reports by the Defense Department’s inspector general, as well as Bell Pottinger’s corporate filings and specialist publications on military propaganda.” Black and Fielding-Smith also interviewed former officials and contractors involved in information operations in Iraq.

4. Voter suppression in the 2016 presidential election

The 2016 election was the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a 5-4 conservative majority in the Supreme Court struck down a key provision requiring jurisdictions with a history of violations to “pre-clear” changes. As a result, changes to voting laws in nine states and parts of six others with long histories of racial discrimination in voting were no longer subject to federal government approval in advance.

Since Shelby, 14 states, including many southern states and key swing states, implemented new voting restrictions, in many cases just in time for the election. These included restrictive voter-identification laws in Texas and North Carolina, English-only elections in many Florida counties, as well as last-minute changes of poll locations, and changes in Arizona voting laws that had previously been rejected by the Department of Justice before the Shelby decision.

Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot:

The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, was foremost among a small number of nonmainstream journalists to cover the suppression efforts and their results. In May 2017, he reported on an analysis of the effects of voter suppression by Priorities U.S.A, which showed that strict voter-ID laws in Wisconsin and other states resulted in a “significant reduction” in voter turnout in 2016 with “a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters.” Berman noted that turnout was reduced by 200,000 votes in Wisconsin, while Donald Trump won the state by just over 22,000 votes.

Nationwide, the study found that the change in voter turnout from 2012 to 2016 was significantly impacted by new voter-ID laws. In counties that were more than 40 percent African- American, turnout dropped 5 percent with new voter-ID laws, compared to 2.2 percent without. In counties that were less than 10 percent African-American, turnout decreased 0.7 percent with new voter-ID laws, compared to a 1.9 percent increase without.

5. Big data and dark money behind the 2016 election

When Richard Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946, he and his supporters used a wide range of dirty tricks aimed at smearing his opponent as pro-Communist, including a boiler-room operation generating phone calls to registered Democrats, which simply said, “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Then the caller would hang up.

In 2016, the same basic strategy was employed but with decades of refinement, technological advances and massively more money behind it. A key player in this was right-wing computer scientist and hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who contributed $13.5 million to Trump’s campaign and also funded Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that specializes in “election management strategies” and using “psychographic” microtargeting – based on thousands of pieces of data for some 220 million American voters – as Carole Cadwalladr reported for the Guardian in February 2017. After Trump’s victory, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix said, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.”

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, was more old-school until recently in elections across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. In Trinidad, it paid for the painting of graffiti slogans purporting to be from grassroots youth. In Nigeria, it advised its client party to suppress the vote of their opposition “by organizing anti-poll rallies on the day of the election.” But now they’re able to micro-target their deceptive, disruptive messaging.

This messaging had everything to do with how those targeted would respond, not with Trump’s or Mercer’s views. In a New Yorker profile, Jane Mayer noted that Mercer argued that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a major mistake, a subject not remotely hinted at during the campaign.

6. Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” threaten health and foundations of medicine

The problem of antibiotics giving rise to more dangerous drug-resistant germs (“superbugs”) has been present since the early days of penicillin, but has now reached a crisis, with companies creating dangerous superbugs when their factories leak industrial waste, as reported by Madlen Davies of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in September 2016. Factories in China and India – where the majority of worldwide antibiotics are manufactured – have released “untreated waste fluid” into local soils and waters, leading to increases in antimicrobial resistance that diminish the effectiveness of antibiotics and threaten the foundations of modern medicine.

“After bacteria in the environment become resistant, they can exchange genetic material with other germs, spreading antibiotic resistance around the world, according to an assessment issued by the European Public Health Alliance, which served as the basis for Davies’s news report,” Projected Censored explained. One strain of drug-resistant bacterium that originated in India in 2014 has since spread to 70 other countries.

“The EPHA assessment recommended five responses that major purchasers of medicines could implement to help stop antibiotic pollution. Among these recommendations are blacklisting pharmaceutical companies that contribute to the spread of superbugs through irresponsible practices, and promoting legislation to incorporate environmental criteria into the industry’s good manufacturing practices.”

7. The toll of U.S. Navy training on wildlife in the North Pacific

The U.S. Navy has killed, injured or harassed marine mammals in the North Pacific almost 12 million times over a five-year period, according to research conducted by The West Coast Action Alliance and reported by Dahr Jamail for Truthout. This includes whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea lions and other marine wildlife such as endangered species like humpback whales, blue whales, gray whales, sperm whales, Steller sea lions and sea otters. The number was tabulated from the Navy’s Northwest Training and Testing environmental impact statement and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Letter of Authorization for the number of “takes” of marine mammals caused by Navy exercises. “A ‘take’ is a form of harm to an animal that ranges from harassment, to injury, and sometimes to death,” Jamail wrote.

“It is, and has been for quite some time now, well known in the scientific community that the Navy’s use of sonar can damage and kill marine life,” Jamail reported.

“With little oversight on Navy training activities, the public is left in the dark regarding their environmental impacts, including especially how Navy operations impact fish in the North Pacific and marine life at the bottom of the food chain,” Project Censored noted.

8. Maternal mortality a growing threat in the U.S.

The U.S. maternal mortality rate is rising, while it’s falling elsewhere across the developed world. Serious injuries and complications are needlessly even more widespread with shockingly little attention being paid.

“Each year over 600 women in the U.S. die from pregnancy-related causes and over 65,000 experience life-threatening complications or severe maternal morbidity,” Elizabeth Dawes Gay reported, covering an April 2016 congressional briefing organized by Women’s Policy, Inc. “The average national rate of maternal mortality has increased from 12 per 100,000 live births in 1998 to 15.9 in 2012, after peaking at 17.8 in 2011.”

“Inadequate health care in rural areas and racial disparities are drivers of this maternal health crisis,” Project Censored summarized. “Nationally, African-American women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes, with rates even higher in parts of the U.S. that Gay characterized as ‘pockets of neglect,’ such as Georgia, where the 2011 maternal mortality rate of 28.7 per 100,000 live births was nearly double the national average.”

The Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, has developed safety bundles of ‘best practices, guidelines and protocols to improve maternal health care quality and safety,’” Gay wrote. “These ‘bundles’ include equipping hospital labor units with a fully stocked cart for immediate hemorrhage treatment, establishing a hospital-level emergency management protocol, conducting regular staff drills and reviewing all cases to learn from past mistakes, among other things.”

More broadly, Kiera Butler reported for Mother Jones that doctors rarely warn patients of the potential for serious injuries and complications that can occur following birth.

Many state laws require doctors to inform women of the potential complications and dangers associated with delivery, but none require them to discuss potential long-term problems, including the fact that some complications are more prevalent in women who give birth vaginally, rather than by C-section.

9. DNC claims right to select presidential candidate

A key story about 2016 election has mostly been ignored by the media – a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Democratic National Committee broke legally binding neutrality agreements in the Democratic primaries by strategizing to make Hillary Clinton the nominee before a single vote was cast. The lawsuit was filed against the DNC and its former chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in June 2016 by Beck and Lee, a Miami law firm, on behalf of supporters of Bernie Sanders. A hearing was held on the suit in April 2017, in which DNC lawyers argued that neutrality was not actually required and that the court had no jurisdiction to assess neutral treatment.

As Michael Sainato reported for the Observer, DNC attorneys claimed that Article V, Section 4 of the DNC Charter – which instructs the DNC chair and staff to ensure neutrality in the Democratic presidential primaries – is actually “a discretionary rule” that the DNC “didn’t need to adopt to begin with.” Sainato also reported that DNC attorneys argued that specific terms used in the DNC charter – including “impartial” and “evenhanded” – couldn’t be interpreted in a court of law.

Jared Beck, representing the Sanders supporters, responded, “Your Honor, I’m shocked to hear that we can’t define what it means to be evenhanded and impartial. If that were the case, we couldn’t have courts.

I mean, that’s what courts do every day, is decide disputes in an evenhanded and impartial manner.” Not only was running elections in a fair and impartial manner a “bedrock assumption” of democracy, Beck argued earlier, it was also a binding commitment for the DNC: “That’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says,” he said. “It says it in black and white.”

10. 2016, a record year for global internet shutdowns

In 2016, governments around the world shut down internet access more than 50 times, according to the digital rights organization Access Now, “suppressing elections, slowing economies and limiting free speech,” as Lyndal Rowlands reported for the Inter Press Service.

“In the worst cases internet shutdowns have been associated with human rights violations,” Rowlands was told by Deji Olukotun, of Access Now. “What we have found is that internet shutdowns go hand in hand with atrocities.” Olukotun said.

“Many countries intentionally blacked out internet access during elections and to quell protest. Not only do these shutdowns restrict freedom of speech, they also hurt economies around the world,” Project Censored notes. “TechCrunch, IPS, and other independent news organizations reported that a Brookings Institution study found that Internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion between July 2015 and June 2016” – a conservative estimate, according to the study’s author, Darrell West.

As Olukotun told IPS, one way to stop government shutdowns is for internet providers to resist government demands. “Telecommunications companies can push back on government orders, or at least document them to show what’s been happening, to at least have a paper trail,” Olukotun observed.

Advocates of online rights “need to be constantly pushing for laws that protect this space and demand that governments meet their obligations in digital spaces just as in non-digital spaces,” he was told by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye.

Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor for Random Lengths News at the Port of Los Angeles, California.

Project Censored, founded in 1976 at Sonoma State University, is a project of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. Its ranking of the most underreported stories is published annually in Illinois Times. For more information, got to projectcensored.org.