Maarten van Vliet

Communications + innovation

[Golchehrah Yaftali @womenaidafghan1]

In Herat, the Taliban are abducting women, girls, and sisters of the people and are torturing them in this way.
Save Afghanistan.
@SR_Afghanistan
@UNHumanRights
@amnestysasia

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

EU raises alarm: Serbia is massively granting citizenship to sanctioned Russians

According to an investigation by Radio Free Europe, in the first five months of 2026 alone, 44 Russians received Serbian passports, including individuals listed under US and Ukrainian sanctions.

In total, from 2022 to June 2026, more than 300 Russians were granted Serbian citizenship through an accelerated procedure. Serbian law allows this as an exception if authorities consider it to be in the “interests of the state.”

This provision bypasses the standard naturalization requirements.

The pace of passport issuance to Russians has sharply increased: this year, they received four times more citizenships than all other foreigners combined.

The EU is concerned that Serbian passports could allow sanctioned individuals to circumvent restrictions and travel freely across Europe without visas.

[Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture]

5/ But losing is not lost. The danger now is a premature peace that hands Russia at the table what it has been denied on the battlefield. The task is not only to help Ukraine win, but to make Russia's defeat irreversible.
https://t.co/vzuvuK9PI3

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

🇺🇸Trump has stated 55 times that he defeated Iran.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 35 times that Iran is destroyed.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 38 times that a deal is imminent.

🇺🇸Trump has stated 25 times that the Strait of Hormuz is open.

Elect a clown, expect a circus.

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @__Injaneb96]

Armenian customs seized 143 bundles (26 kg) of undeclared Iranian human hair hidden in truck pillows.

A longtime German hair importer reports an explosion and market saturation of Iranian hair.

Another wig maker in LA, with 15 years in the business, confirms a major influx of Iranian hair right now.
This comes right after the January 8-9 massacre, hundreds to thousands killed, bodies missing, morgues overflowing.

The Islamic Republic is a savage terrorist regime.
B💥mb the Ayatollahs into oblivion.
End the Islamic Republic’s terror forever.

[Richard Holmes 🕵🏻‍♂️ @Richard_AHolmes]

To onlookers at Disneyland Paris, he was just another grumpy father, dragged from queue to queue, waiting for hours to get on rides.

In reality, the grouchy dad in Minnie Mouse ears was a Russian tech boss, whose software is being used by military cadets in training to join Vladimir Putin’s killer drone force.

My last investigation for @theipaper exposes the Russian tech bosses travelling freely across Europe, while their software teaches school children how to fly drones.

https://t.co/z79o1lzH6k

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

The Netherlands arms Ukraine on one rule. A weapon that is 80% right today beats a perfect one that arrives in two years.

It buys arms wherever they sit, funds Ukrainian factories directly, and pledges €3 billion ($3.4 billion) a year to Kyiv — United24. 1/

[Fatemeh Shams @ShazzShams]

این‌که طالبان پس از خطبه‌های نماز جمعه این هفته قصد دارند زنانی را که در ملأعام نقاب بر چهره نداشته‌اند شلاق بزنند، باید خشم و هراس را در وجدان هر انسان آزاده‌ای برانگیزد.

سکوتتان را بشکنید!

سازمان‌هایی که برای دفاع از حقوق بشر فعالیت می‌کنند، تا این لحظه چه کرده‌اند؟ چرا این سطح از خشونت و سرکوب، تیتر اول رسانه‌های جهان نیست؟ چرا صدای زنان افغانستان بار دیگر در هیاهوی سیاست و جنگ گم شده است؟

از خواهرانمان در هرات بنویسیم. از زنانی که هر روز با محدودیت، تحقیر و تهدید روبه‌رو هستند. نگذاریم رنج آن‌ها زیر اخبار جنگ مدفون شود.

#زنان_افغانستان
#زنان_هرات
#زن_زندگی_آزادی

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

For the first time, the UN placed the Russian army on blacklist for conflict-related sexual violence.

The UN's annual report on sexual violence in conflict has documented hundreds of confirmed cases of violence against prisoners of war and civilians.

The report covers the period from January to December 2025. A total of 77 government and non-government organizations from 12 countries were added to the blacklist.
▪️The UN managed to verify 310 cases of conflict-related sexual violence within the territory of the Russia and in the occupied Ukrainian territories.
▪️The violations included rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, and electroshock forced administered to the genitals.
▪️As a result of the cases of sexual violence committed by the Russian armed forces and security forces mentioned in the report, 280 men, 26 women, and four girls were affected.

"Of these, 52 cases were committed during 2025, mostly against male prisoners of war and civilian detainees. The remaining cases, although verified and documented in 2025, occurred between February 2022 and December 2024," said Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, who presented the report.

Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN, Nebenzya, stated that the UN report on sexual violence is aimed at discrediting Russia.

Finally, Russia is being recognized for what it is.

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

This Administration has removed the achievements of the Air Force’s first female Thunderbird pilot Retired Colonel Nicole Malachowski. The removal of these articles have sparked criticism because her place in Air Force history is not a Political slogan it’s well documented.

[Laiken Jordahl @LaikenJordahl]

BREAKING: We're suing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service over their plan to give away 715 acres of a public wildlife refuge to billionaire corporation Space X.

We shouldn't be sacrificing our cherished public lands to subsidize a company owned by the richest man in the world.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

2/ The tails die first.

The researchers plotted what each generation of AI remembers about the original data.

Generation 1: the full distribution. Every rare idea. Every unusual perspective.
Generation 5: the edges are gone. Only the middle remains.
Generation 9: a single narrow spike. One voice. One style. One version of reality.

The weird, creative, unexpected parts of human writing are the first things Model Collapse erases.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

1/ The death spiral in one chart.

Generation 1: the model produces text that sounds human.
Generation 3: the output starts repeating itself.
Generation 5: rare words disappear entirely.
Generation 9: the model produces nonsense.

Each generation trained on the previous generation's output. Each generation lost more. The researchers watched it happen in real time.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Imagine an underwater Grand Canyon where corals have been growing since before the United States was founded. 🐠

Plunged in total darkness. Untouched. Protected.

Until one signature changed everything.

On February 6, 2026, that's exactly what happened.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is bigger than Yellowstone.

Its submarine canyons drop into depths we're still mapping. There are sea creatures here science hasn't even named yet.

It’s underwater mountains — millions of years old, rise from the ocean floor, drawing sperm whales and endangered right whales from miles away.

The cold-water corals living here? Some have been growing for over a thousand years. A trawl net destroys them in seconds. They don't grow back in our lifetimes.

The monument was created in 2016 for one reason — to keep this ecosystem off limits from exactly this kind of destruction.

It worked. Until February.

One person. One signature. Zero public input. No congressional vote. No comment period. Just a proclamation — and a thousand-year-old ecosystem lost its protection overnight.

Proclamation 11009 — "Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Atlantic"— erased the ban overnight. Trawl gear, dredges, otter nets. Now permitted inside monument boundaries.

And here's the part that should make you angry — this administration tried this exact move in 2020. Conservation groups sued. They won. Biden restored protections.

Now we're back here.

How many more monuments have to lose their protections before Congress does something? 🐠

#DemsUnited

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

Israeli settlers are burning Taybeh in occupied Palestine.

A village that has stood for thousands of years.

A place where Jesus once walked.

Home to the oldest living Christian community in the world.

And not a peep from Western mainstream media.

[Mariam Lambert : CEO Emile Foundation @Mariam__Lambert]

After the kidnapping of her son, today a Russian drone strike killed Anton’s father‼️

I recently travelled to India with Hanna Zamyshliaieva, who has spent more than four years searching for her son Anton, a vulnerable young man with severe neurological disabilities who was taken by Russia from occupied Kherson.

Hanna’s search for Anton was recently featured by Reuters, bringing international attention to her family’s struggle and the wider tragedy facing Ukrainian families whose children have been taken during this war.

Today, Anton’s father, was killed in a Russian drone strike.

As a human rights defender, I work directly with families affected by child abduction and forced transfer. At the @emile_fondation , we provide legal, practical, and psychosocial support and cooperate with the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine to help ensure victims’ voices are heard and these crimes are documented.

The protection of children and family unity lies at the heart of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and international humanitarian law.

These families are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for truth, accountability, and the return of their children.

🔗 @Reuters article: https://t.co/uN1x2kGM5H

#BringAntonHome #BringKidsBack #HumanRights #Ukraine

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @NAFOvoyager]

She lost her leg to a russian strike. She didn’t lose her dream.

Ukrainian gymnast Oleksandra Pascal won gold at the “Carla’s Rhythmic Cup” in Romania — competing with a bionic prosthetic leg.

In 2022, she survived a russian strike on Zatoka, spent weeks in intensive care, and underwent amputation.

Today, she stands on the podium.

Stronger than war. Stronger than what tried to break her.

[Roberta Metsola @EP_President]

Their memory endures.

And here, in the heart of Europe, it is protected and remembered.

Today at @Europarl_EN, we honoured and remembered the more than 3 million people torn from their homelands by the Soviet regime, 85 years ago.

Though attempts were made to erase their entire way of life, we continue to bring their stories and memory into the light.

#RememberTheirNames

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

Bulgaria is completely halting military aid to Ukraine.

This decision seals a U-turn in Sofia's foreign policy following the landslide victory of pro-Russian Prime Minister—and piece of scum—Rumen Radev in the April parliamentary elections.