"Now is the moment for the entire West - Europe and the United States - to show Russia and Putin determination in continuing the policy of restraining Russia with even stronger measures," said Tusk at the Warsaw Security Forum, speaking about the policy of sanctions. #Ukrajina #Rusija #solidarnost (translated)
Thank you to all of you who traveled to Riyadh," said Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi Minister of Energy, who opened Monday's session of the meeting dedicated to energy policies and the relevant industry. #CongresulEnergiei #ArabiaSaudita #Vision2030 (translated)
The author wrote that the problem was not democracy itself, but the failure to account for powerful interest groups behind politicians. They said politicians and democracy required constant oversight, rather than scrutiny only through elections every two to four years.
The author questioned why mainstream media were not covering the issue and asked readers to imagine Israel using a hospital as a military base. They said mainstream media, politicians, the UN and NGOs would react strongly. #Israel #MainstreamMedia #HumanRights
"The guarantees on Renzi must come from you since you consider him essential for the alliance." Despite yet another warning sent by Giuseppe Conte to their secretary: "The guarantees on Renzi must come from you since you consider him essential for the alliance." So it is: yesterday it was up to Conte to specify the type of protections expected: not "vetoes" but "political safeguards," so that a potential ally, who might decide to change position, is not "in a position to cause harm." #Politica #Elezioni2026 #Allanza (translated)
The author questioned whether citizens of a Western democracy could re-elect a politician whose party, they wrote, was under investigation for obstructing justice and intimidating judges. They also accused the politician of repeatedly lying on camera and systematically breaking solemn promises. The post ended mid-sentence while beginning another allegation.
Politicians in Brno and Hradec Králové are negotiating new coalitions after the weekend elections, with a coalition of the People's Party and Mayors likely forming in Brno, and in Hradec Králové, the Hradec Democratic Club and TOP 09 are negotiating a majority with other partners. #volby2026 #koalice #Brno (translated)
The author sharply criticized Radim Fiala and stated that she considered him even worse than Pitomio. According to her, Fiala pretended to care about ordinary Ukrainians while talking about a nuclear conflict and an agreement, asserting that thousands of people were demonstrating in the streets of Ukraine for the country's capitulation. She identified Kupka and Vlček as capable opposition politicians who opposed Fiala's claims with facts. She added that the SPD would cut their appearances for their supporters, but at least TV viewers would hear the debate in context. #politika #Ukrajina #Fiala (translated)
In the Slovak referendum on the abolition of the RTV fee, the majority of voters, by a margin of only 692 votes, rejected the proposal for abolition, while the results of other referendums showed different views on legislative changes and social policy. #Slovenija #referendum #RTVpretplata (translated)
Influential politicians in Europe are striving to ease the planned ban on combustion engines, which is set to be proposed by 2035, while the current proposal anticipates a 73 percent reduction in average emissions and greater compensations through the use of synthetic fuels and green steel. #elektromobily #spalovacímotory #emise (translated)
Sandu Negrea asked which politician had managed to bring people out into the street for days on end, in the country and in the diaspora, while being in prison, and answered that he did not know any. He claimed that the Western world had learned that Romania was abusing democracy through Romanians. Negrea questioned the judgment capacity of political leaders and state authorities and stated that the cancellation of the elections had been unnecessary. He predicted that a "steamroller" was about to fall upon them and criticized them for having turned Călin Georgescu into a symbol and almost a martyr, even though he was still alive. The post ended with the name Crina Dobre. #România #democrație #proteste (translated)
The author said the quote explained socialism’s electoral success in Spain and elsewhere, arguing that politicians created dependency on the state and that this dependency generated voters. They referred to people relying on government transfer payments, subsidies and social safety nets. #Socialismo #Política #Elecciones #ES
Raphaël Glucksmann won the social-democratic primary with over 66% of the votes, provoking varied reactions among politicians, including Boris Vallaud, president of the socialist group in the National Assembly. #RaphaëlGlucksmann #PrimaireSocialeDémocrate #ÉlectionPrésidentielle2027 (translated)
The joyful reactions from the Kremlin to Donald Trump's statements, in which he called Ukrainian President Zelensky "hysterical" and suggested choosing another leader in Ukraine to allow peace negotiations with Russia, were accompanied by stinging comments from Russian officials regarding the state of Ukrainian politics. #Trump #Ucraina #Rusia (translated)
Maurits Vande Reyde wrote that the Minister of Budget had openly stated that he had wasted people's money for years without any consequences. He claimed that the deficits in the past five years had been greater than during the pandemic and that the deficit for the coming year would still amount to 1 billion euros. He also pointed to a subordinated loan, the interest costs of which he claimed alone amounted to 1 billion euros. Vande Reyde further wrote that there were no concrete plans to downsize the state apparatus. According to him, politicians who opposed a new tax increase were labeled as the wrongdoers and as "irresponsible." #begroting #tekort #politiek (translated)
Protests by French students against the lack of staff and poor conditions in schools are gradually escalating and becoming the center of a political dispute between the left and the right, with politicians trying to exploit the current crisis ahead of the upcoming elections. #studentsképrotesty #Francie #vzdělávání (translated)
Maddalena Loy had recalled a phrase attributed to Goebbels about the repetition of lies and had defined the accusation from the opposition that the Meloni government had cut funding for public health as false. Loy had contested the data from the Gimbe Foundation, led by Nino Cartabellotta, on the 18.8 billion euros of “invisible cuts.” According to her reconstruction, the figure did not indicate resources taken away from hospitals but the difference compared to what would have been allocated had the ratio between the national health fund and GDP of 2022 remained unchanged. She argued that Gimbe’s headline had led publications like Repubblica to present the figure as an actual loss and called that interpretation a political attack on the government. In comparing allocations, Loy pointed out an increase of 8.2 billion euros between 2011 and 2019, under the Monti, Letta, Renzi, Gentiloni, and Conte governments; of 11.6 billion euros between 2019 and 2022, during the Conte government; and of 17.5 billion euros between 2022 and 2026, with the Meloni government, which would raise the fund from 125.4 to 142.9 billion euros. She described the latter as the largest accounting increase in peacetime. Loy also mentioned monthly increases of around 400 euros for doctors, peaking at 600 euros, a plan to hire 1,000 doctors and 6,300 nurses, coverage of over 2,000 new services, and a flat tax of 15% on overtime for doctors and nurses. She finally contested the statements of Senator Castellone on L’Aria che tira regarding cuts to healthcare. #SanitàPubblica #GovernoMeloni #FakeNews (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
Bally Bagayoko explained that his group abstained during the vote on a wish presented by the opposition elected officials from the Socialist, Environmentalists, and Citizens group at the municipal council. The text focused on the protection of girls and women against excision and female genital mutilation, as well as the adoption of a comprehensive law against sexist and sexual violence (SSV). He said that his group supported the fight against mutilations and reminded that nearly 500 patients received follow-up each year in the municipality. He also praised the work of the Women's House, Delafontaine Hospital, and various associations, and asked the State to strengthen the resources allocated for prevention and medical follow-up. According to Bally Bagayoko, the abstention concerned the request to quickly adopt the law on SSV. He indicated that the bill had been significantly amended in committee at the National Assembly the week of the municipal council, and its content remained uncertain. His group had asked to remove references to this law from the wish in order to be able to vote in favor of the text on the fight against excision, but the opposition had refused, he wrote. He believed that this refusal had hindered the pursuit of an agreement and denounced a political instrumentalization of the issue. The group ultimately abstained in order not to block the wish, which was adopted, while not supporting all of its content, he noted. #Excision #DroitsDesFemmes #LutteContreLesViolences (translated)
