Hard-right commentators, politicians and activists in Europe have uncovered a secret to expanding their influence: engaging with Elon Musk.

Take the German politician from a party whose own domestic intelligence agency has designated as extremist. Her daily audience on X surged from 230,000 to 2.2 million on days Musk interacted with her posts. She went on to lead her party to its best-ever electoral showing.

Or the anti-immigration activist in Britain, who was banned from Twitter and sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of court. Since Musk let him back on the platform in late 2023, he’s mentioned, reposted or replied to the billionaire more than 120 times on X — and gained nearly a million followers.

Musk’s influence on the platform he bought for $44 billion has made him a kingmaker at home and abroad. Among those he has chosen to cultivate are hard-right politicians and insurgent influencers across Europe, according to an Associated Press analysis of public data. His dominance, which has real-world financial and political impacts, is fueling concerns in Europe about foreign meddling -- not from Russia or China this time, but from the United States.

That would make you braver than every troop

Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.08.01-195018/https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay

Archived

Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU) has published personally identifiable information of a Russian war criminal and commander of one of the brigades of the Russian forces that regularly launches Shahed attacks on Ukraine.

Details: Lieutenant Colonel of the Russian Armed Forces Ruslan Negrub is the commander of a separate UAV brigade HROM Cascade (military unit No. 35666-B, based in the town of Korenovsk, Krasnodar Krai).

This brigade launches Shahed UAV attacks on the territory of Ukraine. The Russians use them to attack civilian and humanitarian infrastructure and terrorise the civilian population.

DIU reported that war criminal Ruslan Negrub was born on 4 January 1983. His ID information is series 9002 No. 447425, issued on 17 April 2003 by the Mozdok District Department of Internal Affairs, Republic of North Ossetia–Alania. He graduated from the Stavropol Higher Military Aviation Engineering School.

Ruslan Negrub is married to Nadia Negrub, born on 8 March 1981.

The couple are parents to a 20-year-old son. Their registration/residence address is Stavropol Krai, Budyonnovsk, Microraion Severnyi Street 1, apt. 76.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, who was among Jeffrey Epstein’s most well-known sex trafficking accusers, said that it was shocking to hear President Donald Trump say the disgraced financier “stole” Giuffre from him and urged that Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, remain in prison.

Giuffre, who had accused Britain’s Prince Andrew and other influential men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager trafficked by Epstein, has been a central figure in conspiracy theories tied to the case. She died by suicide this year.

Her family’s statement is the latest development involving Epstein, who took his own life in a New York jail in 2019 while facing federal sex trafficking charges, and the Republican president, who was his one-time friend. Trump denied prior knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and said he cut off their relationship years ago, but he still faces questions about the case.

Op-ed by Nataliya Gumenyuk, an Ukrainian journalist and founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab. The text is based on Ms. Gumenyuk's intervention at the Helsinki Debate on Europe in May 2025.

Archived version

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Ukrainian human rights defenders and journalists have spent over a decade documenting Russia's political violence.

Initially, their work echoed the moral legacy of the Helsinki Accords, pressing authoritarian regimes to acknowledge human dignity.

But meanwhile, they increasingly believe there is only one way to protect people in occupied territories: liberation by force. After Russian troops were pushed out of Bucha, Kherson and Izyum, the persecutions of the local population stopped.

Many Ukrainians have come to a painful conclusion: international law cannot stop atrocities. It cannot save lives.

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For us Ukrainians, who live in an aggravated reality, everything around us automatically undergoes a reality check, particularly our values and ideals.

But we also need to consider another recent shift in political reality. Before, the fight against hypocrisy used to belong to idealists. There was a time when autocrats pretended to follow international rules. Today, they boast about breaking them. Instead of hiding their wrongdoings, they commit so many that it's hard not to be overwhelmed, learning about the scale of atrocities, resulting in a feeling of powerlessness.

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Hello. Does anyone here use Zabbix to monitor their self-hosted environment? If so, what architecture do you have, and what does your deployment look like?

Like a national tell your coworkers your hourly/salary day.

Archived

In a significant development that reinforces claims of genocide against Russia, Ukrainian intelligence officials have reportedly obtained a massive trove of files detailing the forced deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children.

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The documents, allegedly hacked from servers in Russian-occupied Crimea, are being hailed by legal experts as a potential “smoking gun” that could prove a systematic, state-sponsored campaign to erase Ukrainian national identity.

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The files reportedly include personal records, details on forced changes of guardianship to Russian citizens, and new addresses for the abducted children across Russian-controlled territory.

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Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR), said these files have been turned over to law enforcement, calling the abductions “one of Russia’s largest war crimes.”

This new evidence provides powerful support for a crime that has already drawn international condemnation. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, specifically over these deportations.

[...]

Kristina Hook, a genocide scholar and lead author of a New Lines Institute report on Russian genocide, argues that the new documents add to an already “overwhelming body of proof.”

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Hook further asserted, “Millions of Russians are involved in this machinery of terror, including the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Every day, we see a level of radicalization and cruelty that only makes sense if the goal is national extermination. It’s time for our leaders to publicly name this crime, as Ukraine’s children are being abducted by extremists who also openly threaten America and our allies.”

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Dr. Michael Cecire, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, described Russian doctrine as fusing “kinetic destruction with population control,” with a goal of “demographic erasure.”

He argues that the forcible transfer and “Russification” of Ukrainian children are not incidental but a key part of a “coherent, state-directed, and multi-domain approach to eliminate the viability of the Ukrainian nation in contested regions.”

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