With the shift from traditional to digital media, the online landscape now hosts not only reliable news articles but also a significant amount of unreliable content. Digital media has faster reachability by significantly influencing public opinion and advancing political agendas. While newspaper readers may be familiar with their preferred outlets political leanings or credibility, determining unreliable news articles is much more challenging. The credibility of many online sources is often opaque, with AI generated content being easily disseminated at minimal cost. Unreliable news articles, particularly those that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, closely mimic the topics and writing styles of credible sources, making them difficult to distinguish. To address this, we introduce SemCAFE, a system designed to detect news reliability by incorporating entity relatedness into its assessment. SemCAFE employs standard Natural Language Processing techniques, such as boilerplate removal and tokenization, alongside entity level semantic analysis using the YAGO knowledge base. By creating a semantic fingerprint for each news article, SemCAFE could assess the credibility of 46,020 reliable and 3,407 unreliable articles on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our approach improved the macro F1 score by 12% over state of the art methods. The sample data and code are available on GitHub

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched--fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. "The government said to me, 'We need you to make drones,' " Yakovenko told me.

Wikipedia is powered by MediaWiki, a free and open-source software that is also the infrastructure for many other wiki-based online encyclopedias. These include the recently launched website Ruwiki, which has copied and modified the original Russian Wikipedia content to conform to Russian law. To identify practices and narratives that could be associated with different forms of knowledge manipulation, this article presents an in-depth analysis of this Russian Wikipedia fork. We propose a methodology to characterize the main changes with respect to the original version. The foundation of this study is a comprehensive comparative analysis of more than 1.9M articles from Russian Wikipedia and its fork. Using meta-information and geographical, temporal, categorical, and textual features, we explore the changes made by Ruwiki editors. Furthermore, we present a classification of the main topics of knowledge manipulation in this fork, including a numerical estimation of their scope. This research not only sheds light on significant changes within Ruwiki, but also provides a methodology that could be applied to analyze other Wikipedia forks and similar collaborative projects.

Russian air defence units destroyed 13 Ukrainian drones over three western Russia regions, the Russian Defence Ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. Ukraine's air force said the country's air defence shot down two missiles and 18 drones launched by Russia overnight. Russian forces have taken control of the settlement of Blahodatne in eastern Ukraine, Russia's RIA state news agency reported, citing the Defence Ministry. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022. During the same period, an estimated 370,000 soldiers were injured, he added in a post on X. Russian air defence units destroyed 13 Ukrainian drones over three western Russia regions, the Russian Defence Ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.

Ukraine continues to reel from Russia's missile strike on Monday, which ranks as the largest attack since the start of the war, as Moscow is beginning to suggest that Ukraine could make desperate moves. "Russia's large-scale strikes on Ukraine's critical infrastructure on Monday are almost certainly in response to Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast, breaching Russia's border," Rebekah Koffler, told Fox News Digital. "Zelenskyy likely anticipated Russia's retaliation and accepted the risk anyway," Koffler explained. "Zelenskyy wants to stay in the fight - there's no other path for him personally or professionally." "To stay in the fight, he needs more weapons and financing from the West," she added.

Every spring, thousands of Greater Spotted Eagles make the arduous journey from East Africa and Greece to southern Belarus to breed. Now, a study has revealed the impact of the war in Ukraine on this annual migration for the first time. Researchers from the University of East Anglia found that shortly after Ukraine was invaded by Russia, the birds' usual migratory course was altered. 'The war in Ukraine has had a devastating impact on people and the environment,' said Charlie Russell, lead author of the study. 'Our findings provide a rare window into how conflicts affect wildlife, improving our understanding of the potential impacts of exposure to such events or other extreme human activities that are difficult to predict or monitor.'

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. However, the strategy behind the dissemination of propaganda has remained unclear, particularly how the online discourse was strategically shaped by the propagandists' community. Here, we analyze the strategy of the Twitter community using an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach. Specifically, IRL allows us to model online behavior as a Markov decision process, where the goal is to infer the underlying reward structure that guides propagandists when interacting with users with a supporting or opposing stance toward the invasion. Thereby, we aim to understand empirically whether and how between-user interactions are strategically used to promote the proliferation of Russian propaganda. For this, we leverage a large-scale dataset with 349,455 posts with pro-Russian propaganda from 132,131 users. We show that bots and humans follow a different strategy: bots respond predominantly to pro-invasion messages, suggesting that they seek to drive virality; while messages indicating opposition primarily elicit responses from humans, suggesting that they tend to engage in critical discussions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing the strategy behind propaganda from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine through the lens of IRL.

There is a sense of uneasiness when the screen lights up. Excitement, yes, because you're being shown a new way to fight a war, having gained access to a perspective until now closed to human perception. But also modesty because the action is down below, a thousand miles below, and all the courage and suffering of the battle are so distant as to almost lose their human meaning. In a recent visit to Palantir's offices in London, I was able to witness first-hand how the firm's superior data technology really works. I have not been able to stop thinking about the experience ever since.

We study the prices of European Emission Allowances (EUA), whereby we analyze their uncertainty and dependencies on related energy prices (natural gas, coal, and oil). We propose a probabilistic multivariate conditional time series model with a VECM-Copula-GARCH structure which exploits key characteristics of the data. Data are normalized with respect to inflation and carbon emissions to allow for proper cross-series evaluation. The forecasting performance is evaluated in an extensive rolling-window forecasting study, covering eight years out-of-sample. We discuss our findings for both levels- and log-transformed data, focusing on time-varying correlations, and in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Elon Musk's SpaceX may be willing to supply Ukraine with Starlink service as it repels the Russian invasion, but it's not thrilled with every use of the satellite internet technology. Operating chief Gwynne Shotwell tells guests at a Federal Aviation Administration conference that SpaceX objects to reported uses of Starlink to control military drones. While the company doesn't mind troops using satellite broadband for communication, it doesn't mean for the platform to be used for "offensive purposes," Shotwell says. The executive adds that SpaceX can limit Ukraine's ability to use Starlink with combat drones, and has already done so. The company hasn't explained how it curbs use in the field.