Christy Quirk

One key battleground we should all keep our eyes very peeled on is Hungary's election in April 2026. PM Viktor Orban is in the balance. If the US's National Security Strategy is now USG policy, we should surely expect some MAGA involvement to help tilt the race in Orban's favour

The weaponisation of the "freedom of expression" concept in the infosphere is part of a larger authoritarian project designed to suppress any forms of counter-powers (NGOs, academic research, media)

So, for me, this decision is unsurprising, and I do expect things to get even worse quickly.

You know the new U.S. National Security Strategy is awful and Kremlin-friendly when pro-Russian propaganda channels in Moldova are celebrating that it no longer includes support for Moldova's EU integration (unlike Biden's 2022 strategy)...

This, the coin, his name being engraved in the US Institute of Peace, these are all first attempts at establishing a more robust and open personalist rule than we have ever seen in this country.

Hope you're wearing your Apple tag

Sure you did. Are you home yet?

Chornobyl protective shield can no longer perform key safety function after drone strike, UN says The New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), built to contain radioactive material from the 1986 disaster, has been unable to perform its main safety function a...

‼️ Chornobyl protective shield can no longer perform key safety function after drone strike, UN says

Everything is fine. “US warned the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that it will reconsider its involvement unless the security body undertakes what Washington called real and immediate reforms.” tvpworld.com/90394548/us-...

Russia: EU is our chief enemy, the core reason why the the war in Ukraine is not ending on Russian terms;
USA: EU is no longer our friend, de facto, chief irritant.
Both criticise EU elites, cheer far-right MAGA/traditional values parties

Wasn’t Rubio going to be that grownup though?

According to French media reports the 🇫🇷 navy last night shot down five drones flying over the Ile Longue, in Brittany, home to France’s SNLE nuclear-armed submarines, the naval component of France’s nuclear deterrent

Bonkers stuff in the NSS. It is like a far-right caricature of itself. The Trump admin believes it needs to save Europe from itself by backing far-right forces within Europe.

As State Dept reprograms funding, get ready for the US to be the funders of far-right civil society in Europe.

OTD in 1994 Russia signed the Budapest memo, guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for their nukes, 44 Ukrainian Tu-22 heavy bombers and 1,068 Kh-55 cruise missiles.

Which have been fired at Ukraine in this war.

Is everything down again?

Four unidentified military-style drones breached no-fly zone to target Zelenskyy's arrival in Dublin Gardaí are investigating whether the drones took off from land in Dublin or from an undetected ship.

Quite breathtaking story - military grade drones at Dublin airport which flew on the path Zelensky's plane took. The drones reached the flight path of his plane exactly the time it should have been there, but just missed it because Zelensky arrived ahead of schedule:

I’m sorry but why Jared Kushner decides the fate of my country ?

Such a great thread. theonion.com/fritolaysia-...

Moldovans found yet another Gerbera drone in Pepeni village, in the north of the country. They decided to take it home 😳

www.zdg.md/stiri/stiri-...

What if, instead of policies for countering foreign interference, we had policies inviting it?

Walking around like 'oh wow but who would have told us' and its like 'literally Kamala Harris told you everything htat has happened under Trump in her debates. If you watched the debates, you were explicitly told.'

Der Spiegel: Commander in Sleep

The collective noun for a group of Russian refineries is a combustion.

Eugene Hasenfus, Gunrunner Who Exposed Iran-Contra Plot, Dies at 84

How quaint

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

good piece!

This is really excellent. Don't do the dance.

Think you have problems w/data collection?@chathamhouse.org releases one of last remaining (only?) public surveys of Belarusians. This is more interesting to me than the data which (necessarily) skew urban/educated. It's better than nothing, but look for such challenges increasingly in Georgia too

Yes, it was originally used by foreign powers like Russia and China and other authoritarians to allege that the CIA was behind protests in their sphere of influence. But the MAGA fringe has now alleged for years that the CIA and now USAID secretly ran “treasonous domestic color revolutions” here.

Research has shown (to my mind, conclusively), that AI cannot (and in fact, will never) replace data collection, both because new issues arise and the correlates of opinion are not stable.

So what this seems to be doing is sentiment analysis from Reddit or other social media sites

This is a compelling way to present information