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Prominent Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre was brutally bloodied, beaten and raped by a "well-known prime minister" in a series of savage encounters that finally helped the teenager break free from the sex trafficker's spell. In her posthumous memoir "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," Giuffre recalled begging Epstein to step in after the unnamed politician forced her to beg for her life. In her memoir, Giuffre said she first met the "Prime Minister" on Epstein's private island in the US Virgin Islands sometime in 2002, when she was just 18. She was ordered to escort him to a cabana, but the man made it clear as soon as they were alone that "he wanted violence." "He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took pleasure in seeing me in fear for my life. Horrifically, the Prime Minister laughed when he hurt me and got more aroused when I begged him to stop. I emerged from the cabana bleeding from my mouth, vagina, and anus. For days, it hurt to breathe and to swallow," Giuffre wrote. The final breaking point came that summer when Epstein and his madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, pleaded with Giuffre to carry their child. Barak has repeatedly denied Giuffre's abuse claims. Barak was a personal friend of Epstein's and used several million dollars of Epstein's money to finance a security company. He had visited Epstein on his private island and had boarded his private plane.
Note: Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year in May 2025, once declared, "I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape or form am I suicidal ... I have made this known to my therapist and GP – If something happens to me – in the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me [quieted]." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's criminal enterprise.
President Donald Trump's authorization this week of Central Intelligence Agency operations aimed at toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro prompted warnings from foreign policy experts. The amount of narcotics entering the United States via the country is relatively insignificant. Approximately 90% of US-bound cocaine enters the country via Mexico, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and other government agencies. Venezuela is also not a significant source of fentanyl, which is the leading cause of overdoses in the US and is also trafficked primarily through Mexico."Using covert or military measures to destabilize or overthrow regimes reminds us of some of the most notorious episodes in American foreign policy, which undermined the human rights and sovereignty of countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean," said [policy advisor Matt] Duss. The US has launched at least 41 interventions that successfully overthrew governments in the hemisphere since 1898. Washington has helped install and prop up brutal dictators and assisted in the subversion of democratic movements, including by training Venezuelan forces in torture and repression at the notorious US Army School of the Americas. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have also died as a result of US economic sanctions on Venezuela, according to research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "If Venezuela did not possess oil, gas, gold, fertile land, and water, the imperialists wouldn't even look at our country," [Maduro] added.
Note: Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.
Some 10,000 American troops are currently supporting the Trump-ordered counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean. At this point the military intervention has killed 27 people, including individuals who are likely not Venezuelan. President Trump's most recent explanation to reporters for this unprecedented Pentagon build-up off Venezuela's coast was surprisingly reminiscent of the failed "war on drugs" which hearkens all the way back to the days of Richard Nixon, when he famously declared it "public enemy number one". There was a time ... where the CIA itself was the biggest narco-trafficker in United States and perhaps the entire Western hemisphere. This was to fund regime change and covert operations in Latin America after a belated Congressional crackdown on taxpayer funding for black ops. In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News [published a] series of articles linking the CIA's "contra" army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. During the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The CIA's drug network, wrote [journalist Gary] Webb, "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the â€crack' capital of the world." Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.
Note: Though President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs by declaring drugs "public enemy No. 1," secretly he admitted in a 1973 Oval Office meeting that marijuana was "not particularly dangerous." The War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure that has been made worse by every presidential administration since Nixon. Don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the War on Drugs.
In July, US group Delta Air Lines revealed that approximately 3 percent of its domestic fare pricing is determined using artificial intelligence (AI) – although it has not elaborated on how this happens. The company said it aims to increase this figure to 20 percent by the end of this year. According to former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan ... some companies are able to use your personal data to predict what they know as your "pain point" – the maximum amount you're willing to spend. In January, the US's Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates fair competition, reported on a surveillance pricing study it carried out in July 2024. It found that companies can collect data directly through account registrations, email sign-ups and online purchases in order to do this. Additionally, web pixels installed by intermediaries track digital signals including your IP address, device type, browser information, language preferences and "granular" website interactions such as mouse movements, scrolling patterns and video viewing behaviour. This is known as "surveillance pricing". The FTC Surveillance Pricing report lists several ways in which consumers can protect their data. These include using private browsers to do your online shopping, opting out of consumer tracking where possible, clearing the cookies in your history or using virtual private networks (VPNs) to shield your data from being collected.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
Despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government's direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001 – the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified [the] "war on terror" – associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. After spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaida, the U.S. government ... has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaida-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expressly because of his alleged support for terrorism. The Taliban's link to al-Qaida was once upon a time the rationale for regime change and 20 years of U.S. war in Afghanistan – which, of course, ended with the Taliban coming back into power, which Washington appears to be coming to peace with now. Meanwhile, Trump has also continued and escalated the trend started under the Biden administration of turning the "war on terror" inward. The president is now threatening to deploy the military against what he calls the "enemy from within," as his administration pushes to treat a variety of domestic critics, dissidents, and opposition groups as terrorist threats over their First Amendment-protected activity. Expansive powers claimed by President Bush and then Obama [were] used in new, alarming ways they were never originally intended for, including to intimidate and punish political dissent. What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.
Note: The number of terrorism-linked fatalities in Africa was very low in 2003. After the US began counterterrorism efforts on the continent, the number of terrorism-related deaths increased by more than 82,000 percent. In our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we present undeniable evidence that US geopolitical interests have never been loyal to nations or human rights values it claims to defend – only to the ongoing consolidation of power.
It was early 2012 when doctors found a tumor in Kim Franzi's brain. Franzi underwent a risky two-day brain surgery to remove the mass, which doctors warned could leave her paralyzed or prove fatal. The operation was successful, but more than 13 years later, she still suffers from side effects, including issues with her reflexes, teeth, hearing, and vision. Before discovering the tumor, Franzi used the birth control shot Depo-Provera for more than 15 years. The shot has been used by roughly one in four sexually active women in the United States, bringing in hundreds of millions in profits annually for the pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, which manufactures and distributes the drug. But according to more than 1,200 lawsuits, Pfizer has failed to properly warn the public about long-established links between Depo-Provera and meningiomas. That includes a lawsuit submitted on Franzi's behalf, plus more than 9,500 cases that have yet to be filed. In 2024, a large study of more than 18,000 cases of women undergoing surgery for meningiomas found that "prolonged use of [Depo-Provera] was found to increase the risk of intracranial meningioma." Specifically, the scientists found that use of Depo-Provera was associated with a more than five-fold heightened risk of developing a meningioma that required surgery, and that risk increased further if patients used Depo-Provera for more than a year. Drug labels for Depo-Provera in the European Union, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada ... warn about these brain tumors.
Note: Read the full article to learn about how Pfizer omitted six studies that found significant links between patients taking the birth control shot and brain tumors. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and Big Pharma corruption.
"Delete Day," organized by several Gen Z-led groups, called on young people to excise an addictive app from their lives, starting, for now, with their phones. The event was not heavily promoted on social media, unsurprisingly, and minimally online. Instead, attendees relied on more old-school methods, like word-of-mouth. They decorated the park's entrance with chalk signs like "Delete your apps on the grass" and gave out hand-drawn stickers and pamphlets detailing how to save their data before nixing accounts on apps like Instagram. When they were ready, they could take a seat on the lawn, on picnic blankets, with candles, glow lights, and a living room lamp. The event, which drew about 80 participants, featured a few short speeches from the organizers, the deletion ritual, and a no-phones party. Nick Plante, 25, one of the speakers who organizes events around "attention activism" in the city, [said] that the night's tone was meant to be positive. The idea was to bring people together organically. "We wanted to really, really get in on a couple of people and change their lives very deeply," [said grad student Gabriela] Nguyen. Speakers shared their own struggles of growing up with social media, from being distracted at school to living with looming self-consciousness. "If you're like me, you've canceled on a friend because the pull to just stay at home and chill with all your devices is just too strong," Nguyen said.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
Emergency rooms, dentist offices, and nursing homes managed by the private equity industry consistently deliver worse health outcomes than other such medical institutions. The difference can mean life or death for patients. A new Harvard Medical School study of more than one million Medicare ER visits found that patient death rates are 13 percent higher in private equity–owned ERs than their counterparts, likely thanks to staffing and salary cuts. On average, private equity–owned hospitals reduce hospital staffing by more than 11 percent and pay ER staffers 18 percent less than non-private equity hospitals. Private equity–backed dental groups have been found to perform medically unnecessary and painful procedures. One firm allegedly extracted healthy teeth from patients to charge them for expensive dental implants, while another performed root canals on the baby teeth of children as young as three. A study of more than 662,000 Medicare hospitalizations in private equity–owned facilities saw 25 percent more hospital-acquired complications, including falls and surgical site infections, compared to other hospitals. Medicare patients in private equity–backed nursing homes suffered an 11 percent higher short-term mortality rate than those in non-private equity–backed facilities between 2004 and 2019, resulting in 22,500 additional deaths. Nursing homes linked to private equity tend to underperform in terms of patient mobility and reported pain levels.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial system corruption.
The federal investigation into the death of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was marred by significant lapses, experts told CBS News, including the failure by investigators to interview potential witnesses, properly preserve certain evidence and run basic forensic tests. Nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. And details pulled from 90 photos of the cell and other evidence collected in the hours after Epstein's death – but before FBI agents arrived to process the scene – appear to show a succession of basic oversights, ranging from an absence of evidence markers to items being moved, experts told CBS News. "The FBI literally has all of the best tools. I mean, spared no expense. They have every tool you can imagine. And they used none of it as far as we can tell," forensic analyst Nick Barreiro said after reviewing the photos. "I do not believe he died by suicide, no," Epstein's co-defendant, Ghislaine Maxwell, said this summer during her interview in August with the Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche. Epstein's body was discovered at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2019. The first FBI agents arrived at the cell more than seven hours later. When they arrived, photos show they found a disorganized, rifled-through clutter. Epstein's lifeless body had already been removed from the cell, eliminating a critical source of information investigators would need to determine how and when he died.
Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's criminal enterprise.
Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it. Asked last year if he was creating a doomsday bunker, the Facebook founder gave a flat "no". The underground space spanning some 5,000 square feet is, he explained, "just like a little shelter, it's like a basement". Other tech leaders ... appear to have been busy buying up chunks of land with underground spaces, ripe for conversion into multi-million pound luxury bunkers. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has talked about "apocalypse insurance". So, could they really be preparing for war, the effects of climate change, or some other catastrophic event the rest of us have yet to know about? The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has only added to that list of potential existential woes. Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and a co-founder of Open AI, is reported to be one of them. Mr Sutskever was becoming increasingly convinced that computer scientists were on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). In a meeting, Mr Sutskever suggested to colleagues that they should dig an underground shelter for the company's top scientists before such a powerful technology was released on the world.
Note: Read how some doomsday preppers are rejecting isolating bunkers in favor of community building and mutual aid. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.
There are 34 ingredients in M&Ms, and, according to Mars, the company that produces the candy, at least 30 countries – from Ivory Coast to New Zealand – are involved in supplying them. Each has its own supply chain that transforms the raw materials into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye. The environmental impact of ultra-processed foods – like M&Ms – is less clear and is only now starting to come into focus. One reason they have been so difficult to assess is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made foods include a huge number of ingredients and processes to put them together, making it nearly impossible to track. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has driven almost 90% of global deforestation, which has been responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Getting an exact measure of the environmental toll of UPFs is nearly impossible, given that, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these ingredients are chemically modified, some parts stripped away, and flavors, dyes or textures added in – and it's unclear what the cost of these processes are because so many suppliers and components are involved. Another reason is that all UPFs (again, definitionally) are the creations of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their environmental footprint.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption and climate change.
The United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S. is in a "non-international armed conflict" with narcotics traffickers. Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. This comes as he's simultaneously ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon's administration. In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum tracked down Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and interviewed him. He said, "Look. The Nixon campaign in '68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left. [V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect." And [Ehrlichman] said, "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." This line of thinking drove policies designed to "unleash" law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures. And now we're seeing the Trump administration push even harder to roll back constitutional protections.
Note: Though President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs by declaring drugs "public enemy No. 1," secretly he admitted in a 1973 Oval Office meeting that marijuana was "not particularly dangerous." The War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure that has been made worse by every presidential administration since Nixon. Don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the War on Drugs.
Eswatini, the landlocked nation formerly known as Swaziland, is Africa's last remaining absolute monarchy. In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called "third-country nationals"–immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported. In July, the first five of such men arrived in Eswatini, where they were sent to a maximum-security prison and detained in the country without any clear legal basis. Last weekend, the Trump administration sent 10 more people to the Eswatini prison. None of the 15 men sent to the nation are from Eswatini. But they are now under the authority of its king. The situation is a "legal black hole," according to Tin Thanh Nguyen, a North Carolina–based attorney who is representing five men from Vietnam and Laos now imprisoned in the African country. As he explained in a statement Monday: "I cannot call [my clients]. I cannot email them. I cannot communicate through local counsel because the Eswatini government blocks all attorney access." A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons in countries with notorious human rights records.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s making animal welfare a component of his Make America Healthy Again mission. The health secretary has asked his agencies to refine high-tech methods of testing chemicals and drugs that don't involve killing animals. He thinks phasing out animal testing and using the new methods will help figure out what's causing chronic disease. Last week, the National Institutes of Health announced it would spend $87 million on a new center researching alternatives to animal testing and permit agency-supported researchers to use grant funding to find homes for retired lab animals. Kennedy signed off because he thinks the new methods will enable scientists to more quickly and inexpensively draw conclusions about how chemicals and drugs work. He expects that'll confirm his belief that chemicals in the environment and in food are making Americans sick and also speed cures for chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes. The new center will attempt to develop a standardized alternative to animal testing that relies on tiny, lab-grown 3D tissue models, enlisting help from across the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates pharmaceuticals. Harnessing science and technology to protect animals isn't an obvious Trump agenda item. But the president has a pattern of taking ideas from the left and repackaging them for his base, to great success.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and Big Pharma corruption.
After a decade behind bars, it wasn't the fields that stretched for kilometers around him that struck Nicolas when he first set foot on the farm. It was the smell. "I've been through six different jails and they all reeked. But you get used to it and forget it ever smelled bad – until you get out. Here, you can breathe in and out fully," he says, gesturing to the light-stone buildings and tractor parked in the courtyard. Located in Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique, a small village in the north of France, the Moyembrie farm hosts inmates through a detention program run by a small nonprofit. Along with nine others, Nicolas came to spend the last stretch of his sentence beyond prison walls. At Moyembrie, time is served differently. There are no bars, no cells, and inmates can go into town during their time off. All staff are social workers directly employed by the farm – the first facility of its kind to receive a contract from the Ministry of Justice to host inmates. Residents work four hours each morning. They tend to vegetable plots, lead goats from the barn to the field, or cook meals shared in the common room. All inmates at the farm are able to pursue classes and training programs. Some are even run on-site by volunteers, like lessons for the driver's license written exam. Nicolas, who has never had his driver's licence, attends these every week, hoping it will help him secure a job. Over half of the inmates who go there are working or in training three months after release and all leave with stable accommodation.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on repairing criminal justice.
When Mount Saint Helens in southwestern Washington erupted on the morning of May 18, 1980, the stratovolcano spewed a plume of debris high into the earth's atmosphere and spread ash to at least eleven nearby states. But despite the appearance of a mountain-side extinction event, life was already regenerating. Just 10 days after the eruption, the geomorphologist Fredrick Swanson surveyed one of the lahars with colleagues and noticed something intriguing. In the rubble, fine, filament-like threads had attached themselves to some of the smaller pebbles and stones cast out of the volcano's center. What Swanson was witnessing was the phenomenon of "phoenicoid fungi," aptly named in a nod to the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes. Fungal organisms such as these are often the first responders to blast zones and wildfire burn areas where the decomposing landscape serves as a smorgasbord for their biological needs. The fungi used for environmental clean-up come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Oyster mushrooms ... can break down petroleum and hydrocarbons, putting them top of the list when it comes to cleaning up deadly oil spills. A 2023 study conducted in Massachusetts, commissioned by MassDOT, found that there could be benefits to integrating mycelium into the state's pre-existing stormwater management infrastructure to serve as a filtration system to improve water quality.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in on technology for good and healing the Earth.
Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. Every house were shattered by gunfire, roofs were blown open by bombs dropped from internet-bought drones, and everyone walked nervously, scanning the ground for landmines. Scattered everywhere were thousands of dull bronze shell-casings: .50 caliber rounds for sniper rifles and machine guns, 5.56 rounds for AR-15s and similar rifles, and 7.62×39 shells used for AK-47-style rifles. Putting a stop "to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States," as President Donald Trump put it to the United Nations last week, has become his self-proclaimed mission. If the U.S. military does confront the cartels in Mexico, it will find itself facing battle with its own weapons. An investigation by The Intercept traced the bullets that littered the ground in El Guayabo to at least two U.S. firearms manufacturers, one of which operates a massive factory owned by the U.S. military. Experts estimate that around 200,000 military-grade assault weapons and machine guns are trafficked every year from U.S. gunshops to Mexican criminal groups, moving south across the border. Between 2009 and 2011 ... ATF agents in Arizona allowed cartel straw buyers to purchase nearly 2,000 assault weapons.
Note: The US is effectively providing the means for the cartels to wage their dirty war. Read more about how the US arms Mexican drug cartels. Also, don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs including the long history of the US government arming and financing drug cartels for years. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.
Powerful tools that collect and aggregate data, enable facial recognition, and increase surveillance have become a bedrock of American policing over the past two decades. In collaboration with private technology companies, law enforcement agencies at all levels have experimented with how to implement these tools and created a large consumer market for them. Against this backdrop, it is essential to understand the role of the tech industry in both increasing the reach of local law enforcement and enabling mass deportations by the Trump administration. ICE is, for example, one of the largest customers for Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that has scraped more than 30 billion faces from internet sources. Data brokers, including one owned jointly by several airline companies, are actively selling data to ICE and other federal agencies. One of the most troubling recent developments in police data is that it captures information about all people. This "dragnet" approach to data collection is designed to give law enforcement maximum access to the entire population, transforming all personal information into potential evidence. Increasingly, law enforcement agencies are opting to purchase this data rather than collect it themselves, exploiting a loophole in Fourth Amendment legal protections. Some police departments have begun pressuring people into providing DNA samples at routine traffic stops, an attempt to expand their databases.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
The very week the United States' Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a $346 million arms sale to Nigeria, the U.S. State Department also released its 2024 Country report on human rights practices in the West African country. Security forces of Nigeria, Washington's most significant ally in Sub-Saharan Africa, habitually operate with impunity and without due regard for human rights protection – a key condition for receiving U.S. security cooperation. For example, the report spotlighted the following human rights abuses as ongoing concerns: "arbitrary and unlawful killings; disappearances; or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious abuses in a conflict." It also claimed that "military operations against ISIS-WA, Boko Haram, and criminal organization targets" often resulted in civilian deaths. Other findings include the use of "excessive force," "sexual violence and other forms of abuse" by the military. Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been the world's leading arms-exporting nation accounting between 2019 and 2023 for 42 percent of all global arms exports. Several laws exist ostensibly to regulate and ensure that U.S. security assistance is provided to allies without undermining America's core values. However, not once have any of the relevant legal provisions conditioning arms sales on respect for human rights and civilian harm concerns been enforced.
Note: Learn about the loophole that allows US to fund child soldiers in countries like Nigeria. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
Larry Sanger appeared on Tucker Carlson's podcast to claim Wikipedia had lost its way and began censoring accounts which held right-wing or conservative views. 'There is a whole army of administrators - hundreds of them - who are constantly blocking people that they have ideological disagreements with,' he said. Sometime between 2006 and 2007, he began asking questions about intelligence agencies interfering with the entries. 'Virgil Griffith did Master's research,' he revealed, speaking of the American programmer who served a five year prison sentence for North Korea with evading sanctions. 'He came up with a tool called Wiki Scanner that enabled people to look up the IP addresses of people who had done edits and like, who had edited which articles. And so they were able to find a whole bunch of edits coming from Langley.' Langley is often a term used to describe the CIA, the unincorporated community of Langley in Virginia, where the headquarters is based. 'A large part of the remit of intelligence today is to manipulate public opinion in various ways,' Sanger said. 'Wikipedia is like just a gold mine for the intelligence agencies of the world because it's like a one stop shop. You can just like type in the things that you want people to believe.' Carlson had claimed Wikipedia has become 'a weapon of ideological, theological war, used to destroy its enemies.' Sanger said he first recognized and began to describe Wikipedia as 'propoganda' in 2020.
Note: Read more about how the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon secretly edited entries in Wikipedia, including removing references to CIA illegal rendition and torture, downplaying US involvement in Iraqi civilian deaths, and rewriting the definition of "terrorism" to expand its political use. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.