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Björn Harms announced that his new book "The Asylum Complex" would be available in stores the following day; he already had some freshly printed copies in hand. He wrote that the book includes, among other things, a detailed overall calculation of the asylum costs of past years and an overview of the number of asylum accommodations in Germany. According to him, the federal government does not know this number. According to Harms, the book also addresses real estate companies and hoteliers who earn millions by renting to the state, as well as home operators, welfare associations, lawyer networks, and state companies that benefit from the growing market or mass immigration. He announced interviews with insiders from the social industry and the real estate market, as well as insights into asylum NGOs, refugee councils, and million-euro funding programs from the EU and the federal government. Additionally, the book aims to address legal questions related to the topic of asylum. Harms requested feedback on the book. #Asylkomplex #Buchneuerscheinung #Asylpolitik (translated)

Yvonne Kussmann wrote that 22-year-old student Marius Dick was stabbed on July 15, 2026, around 10 a.m. in Trier on a pedestrian path by 22-year-old Afghan Sajad M. After the act, Sajad M. was taken to a psychiatric clinic. There is a suspicion that he was incapable of culpability or had diminished culpability due to a mental illness, Kussmann wrote. Sajad M. had already been in a psychiatric clinic before. Despite repeated inquiries, the public prosecutor's office has not yet informed Kussmann whether he was committed at that time due to a danger to others. Marius's parents gave an interview to the Trier Volksfreund. Four weeks after the death of his son, the father suffered a heart attack and had to undergo surgery. He is currently in a rehab clinic and is supposed to come home on the weekend so that his wife and younger son are not alone. Kussmann wrote that Chancellor Merz called the parents shortly after the act because Marius’s mother was politically active in the CDU. The father reportedly urged Merz to immediately deport immigrants who had committed offenses to prevent further acts. This was a promise that Merz had made before the election. The father is now disappointed because, in his view, nothing has happened. He said that such acts could happen to anyone and accused the government of not protecting citizens. He said this would tear the CDU apart and could lead to other parties taking power. Germany is currently at a turning point, he also reportedly said. As of now, Sajad M. has not commented on the act. Kussmann wrote that she is looking forward to the trial with anticipation and fears it could end with an acquittal due to insanity and placement in overcrowded preventive detention. She announced that she would ask the public prosecutor's office again in the following week about the possible conclusion of the investigation and the status of the forensic psychiatric report. The interview can be found in the comments. #Trier #Gewalt #Justiz (translated)

The German Journalists' Association sharply criticizes AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund for his intimidation tactics against ZDF reporter Fabian Köster, after Siegmund asked questions about the journalist's professional future in the event of a termination of the media treaty during an interview. #AfD #Journalismus #Medienfreiheit (translated)

Tear Off reported that Lewis Hamilton would not attend the interviews after the Singapore Grand Prix, after going to the medical center at the end of the race. According to the account, Ferrari had indicated that the driver was not feeling well and had been examined by the FIA medical team, which had allowed him to skip the post-race interviews. #F1 #SingaporeGP #F1 #GrandPrix #LewisHamilton (translated)

Felix Perrefort reported that Tillschneider referred to Jewish culture as part of German culture when asked about the AfD's position on Jewish life in Saxony-Anhalt. He described it as deeply rooted for centuries and referenced evidence of Jewish communities since late antiquity. Furthermore, Tillschneider spoke of a German-Jewish cultural symbiosis and announced plans to hold conversations with representatives of the Jewish community. Perrefort wrote that Tillschneider's response had nothing to do with extremism or National Socialism. He believed that the accusations brought to the public by public broadcasting and government parties all the way to the Chancellery were lies. He also doubted that Steinmeier or Klingbeil would have responded similarly confidently and sympathetically, and without diversity clichés, and recommended the interview. #AfD #JüdischesLeben #Kultur (translated)

The author announced an exclusive interview for Monday at 11 a.m. He wrote that he had spoken for more than 80 minutes with Heinrich XIII. Prince Reuß and confronted him with the accusation of being the head of a terrorist organization that had prepared a coup. https://t.co/bzVDugJE6P #Interview #Terrorismus #Staatsstreich #DE (translated)

Professor Michael Wolffsohn said in an interview with Drumhead Berlin that the exploratory talks between the Greens, Left Party, and SPD in Berlin deeply depressed him. He pointed out that he, as the third Wolffsohn, had voluntarily returned to Germany after 1945. https://t.co/NVF66JkYMj #Interview #Politik #Berlin (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

Paul Ronzheimer wrote that the central question for Kyiv and other European capitals is what they can and should do to survive Putin. He referred to his interview with Dmytro Kuleba, which is available wherever podcasts are offered. https://t.co/t4BGWhU3mL #Kiew #Putin #Podcasts (translated)