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The fifth destroyer, the USS Oscar Austin, arrived in Rota in October 2024, and the one-year delay in the arrival of the last ship had led to speculation that the Navy might backtrack on its plans due to the refusal of Spanish President Pedro Sánchez to allocate 5% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to military spending, as demanded by American Donald Trump, and the rejection of allowing the use of Spanish bases for attacks against Iran. #USSJohnBasilone #EjércitoEEUU #BaseNavalRota (translated)

Abelardo De La Espriella stated that the Military Forces carried out an operation in Cajibío, Cauca, against members of the Fredy Martínez column, belonging to the Jaime Martínez structure of the Central General Staff of alias Iván Mordisco and the Jacobo Arenas Western Bloc. He wrote that two members of the group died in the El Dinde neighborhood and that weapons, a mortar, grenades, and a drone were seized. He also said that a laboratory with 105 kilos of base cocaine and 1,500 gallons of ACPM was found. De La Espriella added that the forces continued to confront the narcoterrorists and ended his message with patriotic and religious slogans. #Cauca #Narcotráfico #EjércitoColombiano (translated)

Mario Di Costanzo criticized what he called “miserable salaries” at the IMSS. He wrote that the salary tables of the institution set a monthly salary of 13,210 pesos for a maxillofacial surgeon, a mere increase of 372 pesos (2.9%), while Zoé Robledo earned 225,000 pesos gross per month. #IMSS #SueldoJusto #Desigualdad (translated)

Merit Wager wrote that Finland's Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen had said that Finland should not accept traditions, cultures, or customs that limited girls' freedom. According to the Swedish translation that Wager shared, Valtonen believed that girls and women should be able to decide over their own lives, and that religious or cultural norms should not be used to restrict their freedom. Wager also recounted Valtonen's statement that the National Coalition Party wanted to ban face-covering garments, such as the burqa and niqab, in schools and other educational institutions. Valtonen had said that the government led by the National Coalition Party had strengthened the rights of girls and women by more clearly criminalizing forced marriages and female genital mutilation. She had described female genital mutilation as violence and said that every girl had the right to bodily integrity. According to Wager's account, Valtonen also emphasized that equality, individual freedom, and human rights should not be overridden by references to religion, culture, or tradition. Every girl should have the right to be seen, heard, dream, and shape her future based on her own desires, she had said. #Jämställdhet #MänskligaRättigheter #KvinnorsRättigheter (translated)

ShaqVII characterized it positively that some had quit smoking and alcohol. He claimed that this way, those who worked 14 hours a day could endure more and earn more. He also mentioned that not having their own home was a positive thing, as, in his opinion, they spent their money on the pleasures of life instead of on real estate. For those facing panic attacks and identity disorder, ShaqVII stated that they reacted normally in a society and life that, as he wrote, had been shaped by the boomers and were entirely selfish and overconsumptive. He added that younger people worked on themselves and shaped their character, in contrast to the boomers, who, according to him, vented their dissatisfaction with family complaints and onto their children. #κοινωνία #νέαγενιά #ψυχολογία (translated)

Roberto Motta stated that socialism, Marxism, communism, and progressivism were, in practice, the same ideology, which he claimed was based on resentment, hatred, and conflict and had accumulated moral, political, and economic misunderstandings since its inception. #socialismo #marxismo #comunismo (translated)

Daniele Ganser wrote that Trump demanded new elections in Ukraine on October 10, 2026, in front of reporters at Joint Base Andrews. Trump said that Zelensky should hold an election and a new president should be ready to end the war with Russia. According to Ganser, Trump explained that Zelensky was causing problems for the USA and the world. Ganser pointed out that Zelensky had been in office since 2019 and that his presidency ended in May 2024. A term usually lasts five years. At the same time, Ganser wrote that Zelensky had imposed martial law and Ukrainian law prohibits presidential and parliamentary elections during that time. He asked whether Trump would now let Zelensky fall and accused the USA of fueling the war for years with arms deliveries. #Ukraine #Trump #Selenskij (translated)

The post said the strongest body of evidence supported heart-healthy dietary patterns based mainly on minimally processed plant foods, including vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. It also referred to cardiovascular risk, overall diet quality and food sources before linking to further information.

Operation Dark Clark – Russia built a real organisation around a false identity Most influence operations create fake people, fake websites or fake news stories. Operation Dark Clark appears to have gone considerably further: Russian operators built what looked like a functioning research organisation in Latin America, employed real people to produce genuine research and concealed from those employees who was ultimately directing their work. OpenAI disclosed the operation on 8 October after banning a cluster of accounts originating in Russia. The actors used ChatGPT while targeting countries across Latin America, principally to damage Ukraine’s reputation, manipulate domestic political debates and manage a self-described research organisation called the Social Research Center, or SRC. OpenAI assessed Dark Clark as Category Five on the six-level Breakout Scale, the first operation it has disrupted since beginning its influence-operation reporting to reach that level. A front organisation with real employees The SRC presented itself as a research platform studying subjects including Latin America’s relationship with India and the Indian diaspora. OpenAI found more than 60 articles on its website, most of them apparently original rather than plagiarised. Internal reports produced by the Russian operators discussed hiring, dismissals, salary scales, staffing and unfinished research projects, strongly suggesting that the operators controlled the organisation rather than merely collaborating with it. At the centre of the structure was “Mia Clark”, a fictitious identity reportedly used to manage social-media activity and communicate with staff. According to OpenAI, the available evidence indicates that employees working for SRC in Latin America were probably unaware that the organisation was being directed by Russian actors. They interviewed experts, conducted research and wrote papers in what appears to have been good faith. The deception therefore existed primarily at the organisational level: much of the work was real, but the identity and strategic purpose of the institution commissioning it were not. OpenAI This is one reason Dark Clark differs from the familiar model of a troll farm. A reader encountering an SRC paper might be looking at research genuinely written by a Latin American employee based on genuine interviews. The manipulation lies further upstream, in who built the institution, selected its direction and controlled its infrastructure. From forged emails to real events The operation also appears to have attempted something more ambitious than online persuasion: inducing real people to produce events that could later be turned into propaganda. In May 2026, according to the operators’ internal reports, they created an email address impersonating Lima’s regional education authorities and instructed schools to organise activities about Ukraine for a cultural-diversity event. The instructions included references to Stepan Bandera, whose historical legacy remains particularly contentious in Poland and parts of Eastern Europe. The operators claimed that some schools complied, replied to the false address and sent photographs of the events. OpenAI could not independently verify every claim contained in the operators’ reports. It did, however, find Peruvian reporting matching the story, followed by publications in Poland and an English-language outlet in Hungary. Some coverage included comments from a Polish MEP calling for people displaying what he described as anti-Polish attitudes to be declared persona non grata. OpenAI therefore concluded that the fabricated starting point appears to have entered genuine political debate across national borders. The mechanism is unusually effective because the final photographs need not themselves be fabricated. If people can be tricked into staging a real event on the basis of a forged instruction, the operation creates authentic visual evidence of something that was artificially initiated. The same method in Ecuador and Bolivia Dark Clark’s internal reports describe similar efforts elsewhere. In Ecuador, the operators claimed they used a fake education email to encourage schools to stage ceremonies involving President Daniel Noboa and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Ecuadorian media subsequently covered a matching controversy, and the country’s education minister issued a detailed denial. Other Ecuador-focused material included fabricated audio attributed to Ukraine’s consul and a false television report alleging that Noboa’s government was recruiting Ecuadorians to fight in Ukraine. Local fact-checker Lupa found that the supposed Teleamazonas report had never been broadcast, that images had been taken from Instagram, that the audio was AI-generated and that a company named in a supposed recruitment contract did not exist in Ecuador’s corporate registry. In Bolivia, an internal report described a fake audio recording supposedly made by an employee of state water company EPSAS during anti-government protests. It claimed that water supplies to La Paz would be cut and a state of emergency declared. The allegation produced a fact-check and an official denial. OpenAI says the operators explicitly described their objective as worsening the political crisis surrounding the demonstrations. Possible links to the post-Wagner influence machine Dark Clark did not emerge in a vacuum. The operators repeatedly asked ChatGPT about Politology and La Compania, names associated in previous investigations with the Russian influence apparatus that developed from structures once connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Forbidden Stories and its partners obtained 1,431 pages of internal documents describing a network known as “The Company”, which they reported had grown to almost 100 operatives and was conducting influence projects across roughly 30 Global South countries. Their investigation found that the organisation moved under the supervision of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, after Prigozhin’s death. Its documented budget for ten months of activity in 2024 was approximately €7.3 million. Two older Argentina campaigns claimed in Dark Clark’s internal reports — a false story about Javier Milei buying Cartier collars for his dogs and the staging of anti-Milei graffiti — had already been independently attributed by investigative journalists to Politology/La Compania. That is significant corroboration, but it is not enough to prove that every Dark Clark activity was run by the same organisational structure. AI was the back office, not the mastermind Perhaps the most important finding concerns artificial intelligence itself. In most documented cases, the Russians were not using ChatGPT to generate the propaganda seen by the public. Their principal use was administrative: drafting reports for an unknown superior, summarising operations, translating material and recording the supposed success of campaigns. Those reports also expose a weakness in the operators’ own measurement. OpenAI found instances in which they tried to claim credit for developments they had probably not caused, suggesting that they were not only attempting to manipulate Latin American audiences but also presenting an inflated picture of their effectiveness to whoever was supervising them. Dark Clark nevertheless broke further into the real world than any influence operation OpenAI had previously disrupted. Under the Brookings framework, Category Five means that an operation has escaped its original network and been amplified by high-profile individuals such as politicians. Dark Clark crossed that threshold because fabricated narratives appear to have provoked governmental denials, mainstream reporting and political comment in several countries. Its most important innovation was therefore not a particularly convincing deepfake. It was the construction of a partly genuine institution around a concealed foreign controller. The research could be real. The employees could be real. The interviews could be real. What was false was who they were ultimately working for. Sources OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/ Forbidden Stories — Propaganda Machine: Russia’s foreign influence strategy across three continents https://forbiddenstories.org/propaganda-machine-secret-documents-reveal-russias-foreign-influence-strategy-across-three-continents/ Forbidden Stories — Ghost Journalists, Cash and Kremlin Scripts: Argentina https://forbiddenstories.org/ghost-journalists-cash-and-kremlin-scripts-how-russian-operatives-tried-to-influence-argentinian-media/ openDemocracy — Russian influence operation in Bolivia https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-bolivia-south-america-putin-evo-morales-wagner-prigozhin-covert-operations-propaganda-disinformation-foreign-interference/ Lupa Media — Fake Teleamazonas report about recruiting Ecuadorians for Ukraine https://lupa.com.ec/verificaciones/noboa-mercenarios-ucrania-ecuador/ Brookings Institution — The Breakout Scale https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/ Keywords: #DISINFORMED #Episode17 #OperationDarkClark #DarkClark #Russia #LatinAmerica #RussianInfluence #RussianDisinformation #Disinformation #InformationWarfare #InfluenceOperations #ForeignInterference #FIMI #FalseFront #FrontOrganisation #FakeInstitution #SocialResearchCenter #SRC #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #NarrativeManipulation #SourceLaundering #InstitutionalManipulation #ForgedDocuments #FakeAudio #PoliticalInfluence #CovertInfluence #Peru #Ecuador #Bolivia #Argentina #Ukraine #Politology #LaCompania #TheCompany #SVR #WagnerLegacy #PropagandaMachine #GlobalSouth #BreakoutScale #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD