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"What happened (...) is not acceptable", reacted Donald Trump on Saturday, indicating that he would examine a possible American participation in military operations against the Houthis, and would speak with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of the kingdom. #ArabieSaoudite #Attaques #Yémen (translated)

"What happened (...) is not acceptable," Donald Trump reacted on Saturday, indicating that he would examine a possible American participation in military operations against the Houthis, and would speak with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom. #Glucksmann #Ryad #Zelensky (translated)

"What happened (...) is not acceptable," reacted Donald Trump on Saturday, indicating that he would examine a possible American participation in military operations against the Houthis and would speak with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the kingdom. #GuerreAuMoyenOrient #Ryad #Houthis (translated)

The author said they were flying home from Delhi via Warsaw, describing the route back to Europe as a series of zigzags. They wrote that much of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Russia and Ukraine had to be avoided, so their route took them over Afghanistan and the Black Sea region, which they said was also affected by military operations. https://t.co/0AQnkMZXBp #Travel #Aviation #Europe #IN #PL #AE #IR #RU #UA #AF

Anne-Laure Bonnel explained that after nearly two years, she had accepted that her abilities had changed since her cancer. She stated that she had undergone chemotherapy, had two surgeries and radiotherapy, and had contracted a staphylococcus aureus. She specified that targeted therapy and hormone therapy were still ongoing. She also mentioned having difficulties with reading and concentration, which she associated with "chemo brain." In remission, she did not know what abilities she would regain and had to adapt her work to her current situation, she wrote. She said she could still conduct short interviews and take photos in less tense areas, but could no longer work as she did before. Bonnel called on her followers to fund her projects via Tipeee or PayPal. She explained that she had created her own production structure to work independently, without political affiliation or external editorial influence. On the occasion of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she also spoke about the challenges of returning to work after cancer and urged society to better support people in remission, whose aftereffects may be invisible. #cancer #cancerdusein #remission #cancer #cancerdusein #remission (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

Steve Wembi reported that an ambush attributed to the AFC/M23 had resulted in about 20 dead and wounded among the forces of Vectus Global, Erik Prince's security company, in South Kivu on September 17, 2026. According to sources close to the Congolese government and the company, cited by Wembi, the dead included at least seven Congolese and a former member of the New Zealand special forces. Tim Kennedy, a former UFC fighter and ex-member of the U.S. special forces, had been injured and reportedly received three bullet wounds to the leg. Wembi also relayed the remarks of an East African security expert, who described the mercenaries as illegal fighters and war criminals, accusing them of disregarding any rules of engagement. He wrote that Vectus Global's role in the DRC had expanded from securing mining revenues to conducting security support operations in the eastern part of the country. According to his account, Erik Prince's men had deployed to Uvira after the AFC/M23 withdrew from the city in January 2026. #RDC #Sécurité #Conflit (translated)

Clément Molin wrote that Donald Trump wanted to buy diesel from Russia to address a shortage. He claimed that Ukraine had carried out 98 strikes against Russian refineries since the beginning of the year, damaging or destroying many storage and export facilities. According to him, some of the 32 Russian refineries, including some of the country's main ones, had suspended part or all of their activities. Molin estimated that Russia did not have the necessary production capacity to export that much diesel and lacked secure storage and export capabilities after the Ukrainian strikes. He also stated that the country was already experiencing a severe shortage and that accepting this agreement would worsen the situation. #Trump #Russie #Pénurie (translated)

The author claimed that Montenegro had detained the head of the Russian Rybar project, which they said carried out Russian information-warfare activities. They also described the suspect as being continuously involved in aggressive intelligence operations against the West and called for his extradition to the destination linked in the post. https://t.co/6sm6ZBUIXa #Montenegro #Intelligence #Russia #ME #RU