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Now the focus shifts to issues arising from the developed world, the "biggest culprits" in terms of debt, according to IMF director Kristalina Georgieva, but which may not remain limited there. Georgieva states that debt and energy, along with the AI boom that stimulates some economies but bypasses most, are the main themes of the week. #FMI #datorie #inflație (translated)

The author reported that Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, which they described as the oldest natural history museum in the U.S., had closed its doors. They said it was founded in 1812 and opened to the public in 1828. https://t.co/GHoyqJUfRg #NaturalHistory #Philadelphia #Museums #US

Luca Azzola had announced that prosecutor Muscio, who interrogated Alberto Stasi, would be a guest the following evening on *Lo stato delle cose*. He added that she had been intercepted for the first time and anticipated a question about the blood and her attitude towards Stasi. #lostatodellecose #garlasco https://t.co/gHmWHQcdM8 #giustizia #garlasco #processo (translated)

The author of the message claimed that Israel continued to attack Gaza and suffocate the Palestinian people while, as he wrote, the world was not looking there. He added that he remembered it along with Ghaydaa Al-Abadsa, author of "Captives"; Mónica G. Prieto, author of "The Slaughterhouse. Gaza"; the Palestinian activist Taher Ali, and Jaume Asens, author of "Gaza Afterwards." https://t.co/ZXB7xkAUEK #Gaza #Palestina #DerechosHumanos #IL #PS (translated)

Jakub Balcerzak summarized the last Saturday before the start of the 2026/2027 league season. He assessed that the slogan "Beat the champion" will motivate the rivals of Michał Winiarski's team, and each of them will approach the matches with full commitment. He cited the match between Trefl and Sordyl as an example and wondered how many weaker teams would manage to play in a similar way. According to Balcerzak, Lublin was in better shape at this stage of preparations than a year earlier. He praised the creativity of Ran and Ogawa as well as the play of the latter, and positively evaluated the start of preparations for Mikołaj Sawicki, whom he considered well physically prepared. The author was pleased with Roberto Piazza's presence in the Polish club, but noted that there is a lot of work ahead for PGE Project Warszawa, as the Italian coach had only started working with the team a few days earlier. He assessed that Romano could help Warsaw achieve a major trophy this season. After the match against Lublana, he pointed out that the average age of Project's players on the court was almost 33 years. He also wrote that Śliwka's injury means at least a month off, and noted that the captain of the Polish national team has played only 31 percent of league matches in almost three years. Balcerzak called Tymoteusz Lenik one of the best Polish middle blockers from the 2005 age group and younger. He believed that Gheorghe Crețu is guiding the player well and predicted that Lenik would make it to the senior national team next season. He pointed to 22-year-old Mateusz Nowak as a possible successor to Bartłomiej Lemański in Bełchatów and as the best player of Skra during the preparation period. He described Szymon Jakubiszak as one of the leading Polish middle blockers and wrote that he should join a club competing for the Polish championship. Regarding the Italian league, Balcerzak praised Basil Dermaux's performance in Milan, where he scored 27 points, including seven aces. He indicated Hryhoriia Khotsevycha as a potential discovery of the new season of LegaVolley, and described Pardo Matia as an increasingly important player in Modena's offense. He added that his collaboration with Tizi-Oualou was going very well. Assessing the teams from Japan, Balcerzak stated that there is a lot of work ahead for Suntory Sunbirds Osaka and that the team no longer commands the same respect as in previous years. He positively evaluated the new Nagoya and the performance of Norbert Huber, while considering Osaka Bluteon the best team currently in the country, with a significant advantage over rivals. The photograph was signed with the name K. Łukawski. #podsiatka #siatkówka #sezonligowy #Polska (translated)

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

The Gruppetto wrote that Louis Barré had attacked at the summit of Madonna del Ghisallo, with Matteo Jorgenson in his wheel. The media indicated that the Frenchman had launched the American before moving aside, while Quinn Simmons, Christian Scaroni, and Brandon McNulty followed. #ILombardia https://t.co/m71cTDOvHi #Cyclisme #ILombardia #Sport (translated)

Julen Bollain pointed out that Feijóo had said at a rally that his government would ask for sacrifices. He asked who would have to bear them and questioned whether they would result in cuts to healthcare, education, or pensions. He also asked Feijóo to clarify his proposals. https://t.co/ghtcMFOqrq #Feijóo #Política #Sacrificios (translated)

We have a dismissed government. We dissolved the parliament, if we go into early elections and we also need to suspend the president and it is perfect. In quotes. It's perfect. We are a country in shambles," said Grindeanu about early elections and suspension. #politică #România #suspendare (translated)

The author of the entry reported that African governments are launching their own rating agency, Africa Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA). He wrote that it is set to end the "African premium" that policymakers attributed to the actions of Moody’s, S&P Global, and Fitch. He also mentioned that Ghana and Zambia argued regarding the rating downgrades. https://t.co/Ft0T18htHz #Afryka #Rating #Gospodarka #GH #ZM (translated)

"I select boys whom I think are good enough to contribute. Young Utrecht coach Mark Otten granted the Dutchman with Ghanaian roots his debut and said to the cameras of ESPN: 'I select boys whom I think are good enough to contribute. I don’t look at age. He plays very maturely, not like a 15-year-old. He is very stable in his choices. Good enough is old enough, they say. That applies to Donovan as well.'" #JongUtrecht #DonovanAfrifa #Voetbalgeschiedenis (translated)