Wikipedia fails to reflect relevant viewpoints on hot-button topics and describes center-left establishment worldviews, its co-founder Larry Sanger said. This consensus reality is prone to nefarious manipulation by powers that be.

"There is a big nasty complex game being played behind the scenes to make the articles say what somebody wants them to say," Sanger said this week, blasting the current community culture at Wikipedia. "There are all kinds of tricks that people can play to 'win' it."

Sanger, who launched — along with Jimmy Wales — the world's premier website for reference materials, has become a vocal critic of his brainchild. He jokingly called himself "ex-founder," referring to both his criticism and Wikipedia's attempts to distance itself from his person. This week he talked about what he sees as a problematic change in the online encyclopedia to Freddie Sayers, the host of UnHerd magazine's show Lockdown TV.

Cypriot police said the Turkish coastguard fired warning shots at one of its vessels patrolling for undocumented migrants off the island's north coast on Friday, as tensions mount ahead of a visit by the Turkish president to the breakaway north.

The Cyprus government said it was preparing a protest to the United Nations over the incident, which it said was the first of its kind.

But a Turkish diplomatic source denied that either the Turkish or the Turkish Cypriot coastguard had fired on any Greek Cypriot vessel.

There was talk of a "fresh start" when Yair Lapid visited Brussels this week.

Israel's foreign minister was on a mission to "reboot" relations with Europe.

But behind his fresh facade lurked something rotten and sinister.

Lapid wasn't simply visiting to charm those EU representatives who are always impressed by smartly dressed liberals. He also paid a trip to the headquarters of NATO, a military alliance dominated by the US.

So, it looks like GloboCap isn't going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we're headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don't have a crystal ball or anything, but I'm expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.

Yes, friends, a storm is coming. It has been coming for the last 16 months. And GloboCap is steering right into it. I, and many others like me, have been tracking its relentless advance like a self-appointed International Pathologized-Totalitarian Hurricane Center (you know, like the one in Miami, except all the meteorologists are "conspiracy theorists"). We have documented all the propaganda, the lies, the manipulation of statistics, the abrogation of constitutional rights, the New Normal goon squads, the corporate censorship, and all the rest of the roll-out of the new official ideology and the totalitarian measures deployed to enforce it.

Our efforts have not been in vain, but they have not been successful enough to change the course events are now taking ... a course of events that has always been clear, a course that every totalitarian movement needs to take to get where it's going. You can't remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm. Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian "reality" into getting unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.

The White House is tying itself in knots to silence anyone questioning the mainstream Covid-19 narrative, and, whatever you think of vaccines, its latest plans are only the first step toward making thoughtcrime a reality.

The US government is done playing "good cop" with regard to the "vaccine hesitant." The Biden administration, which recently opted to send 'volunteer' vaccinators door to door in what may be the most ill-thought-out public health campaign in US history, doesn't just want to meddle with your body anymore - its plans to control "misinformation" you may send by SMS text message indicate it's intent on controlling your mind as well.

White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is leading the crusade, blaming "Fox News or whomever" for crafting the vision of "a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you've got to do something that you don't want to do." Fauci clarified that it wasn't government officials, but "trusted messengers who are part of the community". Noticeably, he didn't address the "doing something you don't want to do" part - a telling oversight in the minds of those who are convinced the campaign is indeed a coercive one and those who've been paying closer attention to who makes up the door-to-door vax packs.

President Trump mentioned at Texas CPAC last weekend that the US Attorney in Pennsylvania sent the President a letter recently where he claimed former AG Bill Barr told him not to investigate the crimes and corruption that occurred in the 2020 Election in that state.

President Trump then released the letter on Monday he received from former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William McSwain.

In the letter McSwain shared the following:

Angela Merkel's final visit to Washington as German leader today is supposed to be about forging closer ties - but it will serve only to underline the very different approaches being taken by Europe and the US towards Beijing.

There's a saying that a week is a long time in politics. What this means is that politics is, at heart, unpredictable. One thing can happen, and it appears easy to draw quick and definitive conclusions from it, but then, suddenly, another event occurs that suggests the opposite. You think someone or something is done for, then they spring back.

To put it simply, politics isn't a straightforward journey, it can go one way, then another, and seldom are things cast in stone. Never has that been so applicable in describing the unusual trilateral to and fro between the United States, the European Union (or more plainly, Germany), and China.

On the last day of 2020, the EU and China reached an agreement in principle on the comprehensive investment agreement (CAI) - a deal that is loathed by the US. Commentators, including me, pointed towards a growing transatlantic rift between Washington and Europe that was solely Trump's own doing and hailed it as a strategic masterstroke by Beijing.

Lebanese politician Saad al-Hariri abandoned his months-long effort to form a new government on Thursday, dimming the chances of a cabinet being agreed any time soon that could start rescuing the country from financial meltdown.

Hariri announced his decision after meeting President Michel Aoun, saying it was clear they could not agree, underscoring the political squabbling that has blocked the formation of a cabinet even as Lebanon sinks deeper into crisis.

Hariri, a former prime minister and Lebanon's leading Sunni Muslim politician, was designated in October to assemble a government following the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab's cabinet in the wake of the Beirut port explosion.

Arsen Avakov, whose resignation from the post of the Interior Minister was approved by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on Thursday, has a significant influence on the country's security, defense and law enforcement system, and has links to big business. In this way, his stepping down weakens the country's government, Director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics Ruslan Bortnik told a TASS correspondent:

"Avakov's resignation with his business connections, with his influence on the security system - the entire police force was built by Avakov - potentially, undoubtedly, weakens the power structure. Despite the fact that it seems that the concentration of the security system in the president's hands will grow, this is a weakening of the power, and this is the laying of a foundation for more serious street and political risks in the future."

Additionally, the expert thinks that the former interior minister later himself may act against the current authorities:

"The crisis between Avakov and Ukraine's President Vladimir Zelensky is only aggravated by this resignation. At the government's moment of weakness, at the moment of a new political crisis we'll see Avakov's game against the president's office."

According to the expert, the return of the former minister to big politics is only a question of time.

Colombian President Iván Duque has revealed that a small pocket of his country's ex-military arrested over the assassination of Haiti's Jovenel Moïse knew about the plot in advance, while others in the group were blindsided.

Moïse was killed in his home on July 7 by gunmen - allegedly a squad of foreign mercenaries, including Colombians and Haitian-Americans. The president's wife was seriously injured in the shooting.

New information released by the Colombian police on Thursday said two former soldiers had prior insider knowledge of the mission to assassinate the Haitian president. Police chief General Jorge Luis Vargas said:

"We know that Colombian citizens Germán Rivera and Duberney Capador participated in the planning and organization of what was initially an alleged arrest operation of the president of Haiti and for this, they contacted more people in our country."