A Junta de Freguesia de Tôr, no concelho de Loulé, emitiu uma nota de pesar pelo falecimento de Carlos Alberto Viegas Grade, que foi o primeiro presidente daquela autarquia.
O conteúdo Faleceu antigo presidente da Junta de Freguesia de Tôr aparece primeiro em Algarve Marafado.
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Teachers, firefighters and health workers were among those taking part, with around 170 demonstrations planned nationally. High-school students also blockaded hundreds of schools, extending protests that began over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and conditions in the education system.
The industrial action, accompanied by the traditional violence, places Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government under additional pressure before ministers present the draft finance and social-security budgets on Thursday, 1st October.
The French Education Ministry reported that 13.71 per cent of teachers participated in Tuesday’s strike across most of metropolitan France and Réunion. Participation reached 15.28 per cent among primary-school teachers and 12.74 per cent in secondary education.
Separate student action affected hundreds of secondary schools.
Protests were reported in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Nice and other cities. Some demonstrations involved clashes with police and damage outside schools, although much of Tuesday’s public-sector action proceeded without major disruption.
The dispute is centred partly on government spending plans.
Trade unions oppose a proposed freeze in the salary index used to calculate public-sector pay and argue that years of inflation have already reduced employees’ purchasing power. Firefighters have also demanded additional resources following the extensive wildfires that struck France during the summer.
The government is preparing its budget against a worsening fiscal background.
France’s public debt has climbed close to 120 per cent of gross domestic product, while the budget deficit remains well above the European Union’s 3 per cent ceiling.
EU Today reported earlier this month that French debt was heading towards 120 per cent of GDP, accompanied by an increase in the premium investors demand to hold French government bonds rather than German debt.
Higher interest rates are adding to the pressure. Debt-servicing costs have become one of the largest areas of central government spending, restricting the room available for tax reductions or additional expenditure.
The government has also reduced its 2026 economic growth forecast to 0.5 per cent.
Finance Minister Roland Lescure has acknowledged that France will miss its earlier deficit target, leaving the 2027 budget with the difficult task of demonstrating a credible path towards stabilising the public finances without provoking further political resistance.
The budget is due to be formally presented on Thursday. The Finance Ministry has confirmed that Lescure, Public Accounts Minister David Amiel, Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Farandou and Health Minister Stéphanie Rist will present the finance and social-security bills following the Council of Ministers.
The argument is taking place while EU fiscal surveillance is itself entering a more demanding phase.
Under the revised Stability and Growth Pact, member states are expected to follow agreed medium-term expenditure paths designed to bring deficits and debt onto sustainable trajectories.
EU Today recently examined how the EU’s fiscal rules face an enforcement test in October, when finance ministers and the European Commission return to national budget compliance. France is one of the countries where implementation will receive particularly close attention because of its debt level, persistent deficit and political difficulty in securing parliamentary agreement for spending reductions.
The domestic parliamentary arithmetic remains difficult. Lecornu’s government does not control an outright majority in the National Assembly, meaning the budget could become the subject of amendments, confidence votes or further negotiations with opposition parties.
The government has previously relied on Article 49.3 of the constitution to pass financial legislation without a conventional parliamentary vote, although use of the mechanism exposes a government to motions of no confidence.
Tuesday’s strikes add another layer to those negotiations. Trade unions have indicated that further action is possible if the budget contains measures they regard as unacceptable. The CGT has demanded changes to planned spending reductions and public-sector pay policy.
The precise scale of the government’s fiscal measures will become clearer on Thursday. For France, the budget will have to address three pressures simultaneously: deteriorating public finances, the EU’s fiscal framework and domestic opposition to further restraint.
Celebrated novelists J.M. Coetzee and F.M. Siccardi recently published a co-written book, Un mal salvaje (A Savage Evil), about their experiences coming of age in South Africa and Argentina, respectively. Both states were created by colonial forces that all but wiped out indigenous populations and cultures. This excerpt juxtaposes the authors’ childhood memories of life in the shadow of genocide, though neither would have known to call it that when they were young. In particular they recall the workers on their families’ land—men they somehow knew both intimately and not at all:
Freek did not see himself as a tragic figure, did not even see himself as a survivor. To see yourself as a survivor of the past you must have a firm conception of that past, you must know where you come from; and Ros and Freek had no such historical consciousness. First, they were illiterate. Second, it was of the essence of the genocide which they had survived that communal memory was erased.
If I were magically able to return to the 1950s and tell Freek about the Khoi who had pastured their stock at the Cape for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years before the Dutch came and laid waste to their society, about a people who were his ancestors, he would have thought it was just a story I was making up. Genocide is not just the destruction of a people, it is also the obliteration of that people’s store of memories and, with it, the destruction of their ability to see themselves historically.
Subscribe now with a one-month trial for only $1, then enjoy the first year at an exclusive rate of just $99. German state polls yield historic defeat, familiar paralysisDiego Faßnacht reports that the CDU’s historic losses in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin have deepened Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s political crisis without producing a clear alternative. Germany remains trapped […]
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While Slovak politicians calmly keep their academic degrees for copied theses thanks to convenient loopholes in the law, far less visible violations are taking place inside the universities themselves. Dozens of scholars appear to be linked to purchased authorship, data manipulation, and publications in predatory journals. The Plagiat-Navigator project tried to determine how deeply academic fraud has penetrated Slovak science.
In recent years, Slovakia has faced a series of high-profile academic scandals, mostly connected with plagiarism in the dissertations of senior politicians and officials. In September 2025, a scandal broke out around Pavol Gaspar, director of the Slovak Information Service, the country’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency. His master’s thesis on corruption, defended in 2011, turned out to have been copied by roughly two thirds from uncited sources. In response to the plagiarism allegations, Gaspar said that his work had passed all the required formal checks as part of the defense procedure, after which he was awarded a master’s degree. That same year, member of parliament Marian Kery, who had previously publicly accused other politicians of plagiarism, was himself caught in a similar violation. His 2004 master’s thesis, “The Image of Man in Pushkin’s Belkin Tales,” copies almost verbatim a thesis defended four years earlier by student Martina Brodnanova.
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In 2020, leading journalists from the newspaper Dennik N carried out a broad review of the theses of the country’s top officials. It turned out that plagiarism had been found in the works of several representatives of the ruling coalition’s upper ranks, including the education minister, the speaker of parliament, and the prime minister. The scandal led the Slovak parliament, at the end of 2020, to pass a law allowing academic degrees to be officially revoked for plagiarism. But a significant loophole remained in the law: it is not retroactive and applies only to works defended after 2020. As a result, all the senior officials whose work was found to contain plagiarism, including the intelligence chief Gaspar and MP Kery mentioned above, kept both their degrees and their positions.
Dissertation scandals involving the country’s first-tier officials and other senior figures are only the visible part of a much larger problem. These high-profile cases received broad public attention thanks to targeted journalistic investigations, but in their shadow remains a significant layer of violations of academic integrity among Slovak scholars, professors, and university lecturers.
Here one should mention Petr Jakubek, a Doctor of Sciences in economics and a member of the governing board of DTI University (Dubnicky technologicky institut). In 2019, he received a Doctor of Sciences diploma after defending a dissertation at Chernihiv Technological University in Ukraine. As later became clear, a substantial part of Jakubek’s dissertation text coincides verbatim with the text of the dissertation of his opponent, Svetlana Natroshvili, defended in Kyiv in 2016. Below is an example of improper borrowing on one page of Jakubek’s dissertation.
But the problem is not only the absence of citations: even if they had been present, they would not have resolved the issue. In the text, Jakubek mechanically replaced the National University of Physical Education and Sport of Ukraine, which appeared in Natroshvili’s work, with Chernihiv Technological University, while leaving all quantitative indicators unchanged.
The practice of defending a dissertation in another country and then having the diploma nostrified at home is widespread in Eastern Europe and across the post-Soviet space.
If dissertation plagiarism in Slovakia is at least partly documented and discussed by journalists, a much larger problem is developing outside public view. It is a system in which a scientific career can be built not on genuine research, but on purchased articles, fabricated data, and artificially inflated indicators.
In May 2026, the major academic online platform Research.com published lists of top researchers based on h-index and citation metrics. In the field of plant science and agronomy, Professor Marian Brestic, one of the highest-ranked Slovak researchers at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, placed 213th in the world. His colleague, Associate Professor Marek Zivcak, placed 1,511th globally, becoming Slovakia’s second-highest-ranked scientist in the field. As a result, the university took 253rd place worldwide in this scientific area and second place among the seven Slovak universities included in the ranking, losing the top national spot only to Comenius University in Bratislava.
Yet back in 2022, Leonid Schneider, an independent science journalist known for his high-profile investigations into academic ethics, devoted an entire section of his For Better Science issue to Brestic and Zivcak. By that time, these Slovak authors, together with colleagues from Middle Eastern countries, had accumulated nine papers with negative reviews on the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, some of which had already been retracted. Schneider links this to the purchase of co-authorship on the Asian market — a shadow industry where authorship is sold as a commodity. In some of these publications, experts found distorted phrases and terms, or “tortured phrases”: a characteristic trace of machine paraphrasing used to conceal plagiarism. The image below shows one such example in the journal Microorganisms, on the left, alongside an earlier source text by other authors, on the right, from which the “paraphrase” was made.
Since then, the number of problematic publications has grown. Today, PubPeer lists 34 publications by Professor Brestic with critical comments, some of them co-authored with Associate Professor Zivcak. The reasons for criticism, and in some cases for later retraction, included not only plagiarism or conflicts of interest, but also the substitution of authors at the final stage of publication, after all the reviewers’ questions had already been settled. Such substitutions are considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market.
These scandals, retractions, and exposés, however, have almost no effect on rankings. Even if all the disputed papers by Brestic and Zivcak are officially retracted, their citation counts and h-indexes will remain in the databases. These data are not recalculated retroactively after retractions. Formally, the scholars have already taken their places in the global tables, and no later revelations can dislodge them. A victory in the rankings obtained through paper mills and purchased citations formally remains a victory.
The mechanism of these rankings has a direct financial expression. Under the methodology of Slovakia’s Ministry of Education, every publication that falls within the top 1 percent of the world’s most cited papers automatically brings its author 3,000 euros from the state budget, and the same amount to the university. Thus, an artificially inflated citation index means not only a place in a prestigious ranking, but real money. In such a system, artificial citation inflation acquires a direct financial value: high bibliometric indicators affect not only academic status, but also the distribution of public funds. It is worth noting that Slovakia is not alone here: a similar system of monetary rewards for publications in high-ranking journals has long existed in Russia.
An equally telling case of image manipulation was documented in the work of an associate professor at Comenius University. In a joint 2024 publication in the journal Nano-Micro Letters, Dmitry Medvedev, a professor at Ural Federal University and Doctor of Chemical Sciences, and Martin Motola, an associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, together with co-authors from China, manually redrew the scale bar on images of nanoparticles obtained using a scanning electron microscope. The article claimed that the particles under study measured tens of nanometers. The microscope’s technical specifications, however, indicate that the real particle sizes were many times larger (see the image below).
In other words, the scale in the images was simply adjusted to fit the desired result. But that was not the end of the matter. In the same article, experts on PubPeer raised well-founded concerns about other data as well, including graphs. This was not an isolated case: in recent years, experts have identified a whole series of Motola’s papers with problems in the data and in their graphical presentation. The regular appearance of such problems in Motola’s articles can hardly be attributed to simple inattention on the part of the authors.
Publications by scholars from Comenius University also contain direct borrowing of visual materials without references to the original source. A telling example is an article by Professor Peter Mikus and Veronika Mikusova on chitosan nanoparticles, in which some illustrations were copied from an earlier publication by Iranian authors.
In papers where experts identify gross violations of publication ethics, links to Asian paper mills can often be traced. These mills specialize in producing ready-made publications and then distributing them through online platforms.
On the shadow market of paper mills, authorship is not the only thing for sale. Another sought-after commodity is citations. References to one’s own work, like references to the work of others, have long since become a valuable asset. In June 2025, the editor of Chemical Engineering Journal retracted a publication by the aforementioned Associate Professor Motola and his university colleague Muhammad Hanif for artificial citation inflation. Between the original publication and the final version of the article, the number of references to Hanif’s work rose from 2 to 19, and references to Motola’s work from 2 to 10.
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Particular concern is raised by the rapidly spreading practice of publishing review articles under the names of fictitious scholars. The purpose of such works is to introduce numerous citations of articles by people who paid intermediaries on the shadow market for this service into the legitimate scientific record. Thus, the publication portfolio of Beata Gavurova, a professor at the Technical University of Kosice, has raised serious questions among the expert community. “More than 40 scientific articles a year — one every nine days — is a pace that defies rational explanation,” Leonid Schneider notes, following a journalistic investigation published by the Slovak online outlet Dennik N. According to him, dozens of Gavurova’s publications appeared in outlets deemed unreliable or predatory, and some of the journals in which she published have already been removed from scientific databases. At the same time, the researcher’s numerous co-authors represent various Asian countries, which, in the experts’ view, points to the purchase of authorship through networked paper mills.
According to Dennik N, up to one third of papers by Slovak scholars are published in dubious predatory journals.
Yet the external signs of questionable publication behavior are only part of the problem. Gavurova’s own papers contain inconsistencies between the text and graphical data, problems with chemical formulas, and dubious spectra with signals of unnatural shape. Some of these articles have received retracted status.
The next case provides direct evidence of purchased authorship in publications distributed by paper mills. Earlier, the Dissernet community drew attention to the interaction of Slovak researchers with a Moscow company that provided article placement services. A telling example is the case of Boris Sturc, an associate professor at the University of Economics and Business: a preliminary offer posted by this exchange was first documented (see the image below), and later a paper with the title listed in the offer appeared in the International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, with Sturc as first co-author. Analysis shows that this was not a one-off: Sturc’s publication list includes other commercially acquired works as well.
Over time, the shadow academic industry is transforming: centralized exchanges selling papers appear to be losing influence. Their place is being taken by decentralized private intermediaries — individual entrepreneurs, or “paper millers.” Technological progress is helping this shift along: modern AI tools make it possible to fabricate scientific texts in the shortest possible time, without involving large teams of specialists from different fields of science. Offers from “paper millers” are easy to find in open internet channels. Traces of this market can also be found in the publications of Slovak researchers. Below are specific episodes involving Slovak scholars in joint publications offered by “paper millers” from Germany, Ukraine, Montenegro, and Middle Eastern countries.
“Olga Golubnitschaja is the editor-in-chief of EPMA, the European Journal of Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine, and at the same time a co-author of many articles in that journal, which is normal. What is surprising, however, is that for many articles in which she is a co-author, very little time passes between submission and acceptance. In some cases it is only a matter of three to five days. Below are several examples from the past year,” says a review of one article involving her. Such short timelines raise the question of whether full scientific peer review was possible — a process that usually includes selecting independent experts, preparing comments, revising the manuscript by the authors, and reassessing the changes made. Olga Golubnitschaja, a professor at the University of Bonn, often appears as a co-author of problematic papers by Russian and Slovak scholars; some of these works later became the subject of criticism for violations of publication norms.
An expert review of a joint article by authors from Slovakia and Ukraine revealed repeated sections in experimental spectra. Among the co-authors of the article, one figure stands out: Taras Kavetsky, an associate professor at Drohobych Pedagogical University in Ukraine, who was found to have used identical schemes of spectral-data fabrication in other scientific works as well.
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Stanislav Dudic, a Doctor of Sciences at Comenius University and a specialist in international economics, industrial engineering, trade, and investment, appeared as a co-author of a publication that raised serious questions. The paper, written together with the Montenegrin co-author Velibor Spalevic, concerned a modified copper-containing metal-organic framework, and experts detected signs of artificial modification of experimental data. It is worth noting that a number of works by Spalevic himself, a professor at the University of Montenegro, have also been criticized on the PubPeer forum.
Professor Natalia Krivinska, head of the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Management of Comenius University, is a vivid example of how formal co-authorship with dubious partners can undermine trust in a scholar. Her article on combating DDoS attacks, prepared in co-authorship with Saudi colleagues through machine paraphrasing, was retracted. But Professor Krivinska’s problems are not limited to a single publication: in her works, experts have found a whole bouquet of tortured phrases, bibliographies unrelated to the subject of the paper, and even direct borrowing of illustrations, all of which calls into question the quality of her entire academic record.
Another case of questionable scientific practice involves the Institute of Construction and Architecture of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Its employees, Professor Martin T. Palou and Associate Professor Taher Tawfik, were listed among the co-authors of an international paper with Egyptian and Iraqi colleagues, but a review showed that the images presented in the article had undergone impermissible processing, casting doubt on the reliability of the entire work.
The overwhelming majority of the episodes listed above led to no sanctions against the authors. Journalistic investigations and the volunteer work of experts on PubPeer help reveal problem after problem, but real institutional consequences in Slovakia’s academic sphere are barely visible. Retractions do not affect citation indices, and the law allowing academic degrees to be revoked for plagiarism does not apply to works defended before it came into force. As a result, buyers of authorship keep their positions in rankings and universities.
This is the central paradox. Under the Ministry of Education’s methodology, universities receive 50 percent of the state bonus for each highly ranked publication. This means that, in the race for rankings, the universities themselves become interested parties: the more “outstanding” publications their employees have — even if they were bought on the shadow market — the more public funding the university receives.
At the same time, Slovakia’s system of state funding for science, which generously rewards publications in top-percentile journals, effectively creates a “green corridor” for the shadow market. Cash payments to an author for an article they purchased on the shadow market are resources stolen from science. Public funds intended to develop research instead flow into the pockets of shadow intermediaries.
As long as the academic system continues to measure the quality of science primarily by the number of publications and citations, paper mills will be able to turn manipulation of these indicators into academic status and real money. In the age of AI, when producing texts that look scientific is becoming ever cheaper, the problem of how to evaluate scientific work is only becoming more acute.
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Estonia spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, but scandals involving violations of research ethics are becoming increasingly common. Professors sharing authorship with falsifiers; associate professors hiding data behind a “confidential” label; mathematicians publishing “math salad” — all of this reflects today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. Sociologists found that more than 40 percent of Estonian researchers had used “gift” authorship. More in the latest installment of the Plagiat-Navigator project.
In February 2024, the prestigious scientific journal Nature published the article WNT signalling control by KDM5C during development affects cognition. The researchers were trying to understand why mutations in the KDM5C gene cause intellectual disability. The author team brought together researchers from Boston, Oxford, and universities in Australia and China, along with a single Estonian representative from the University of Tartu — Professor Katrin Ounap, a specialist in medical genetics. A year after publication, experts found multiple deliberate manipulations of illustrations in the paper. The figure below shows the same fragments of nerve-cell processes, or dendrites, reused after mirror reflection, 180-degree rotation, and partial retouching. “Such different transformations of individual image fragments are difficult to explain as a simple mistake,” one expert commented. Some images in the paper also bear a striking resemblance to images from earlier publications by other authors.
It turned out that a group of co-authors from Harvard Medical School in Boston, led by Professor Yang Shi, had been using similar methods for at least a decade. In a paper published in early 2016, fragments of dendrite images were likewise copied from another publication and modified through mirroring and scaling.
Professor Ounap’s contribution to the Nature paper was clinical: she provided fibroblast samples from patients. Her co-authorship with the Boston group, however, dates back to 2015. This does not prove that she knew about the falsifications, but in academia co-authorship entails responsibility for the entire content of a paper. The argument that the professor merely supplied biological material does not absolve her of responsibility for the final result fabricated by her colleagues.
While investigations into international publications can drag on for years, within Estonia’s national system universities sometimes demonstrate an ability to act quickly and decisively. The following case is a telling example. In 2013, Andres Menind, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, defended a dissertation on biotechnology for energy production. Soon after the defense, it emerged that the work contained at least three lengthy plagiarized passages, in both the theoretical and research sections. A procedure to revoke his academic degree followed. It was the first case of its kind in the university’s history. The university leadership acted promptly, without delays or bureaucratic evasions. The university did not publish a percentage of textual overlap, stressing that the decision was based on expert assessment of the nature and significance of the borrowings rather than on a formal similarity score exceeding some arbitrary threshold.
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But Estonia’s academic immune system does not always work. In 2002, Valery Korb defended a doctoral dissertation in St. Petersburg that had been copied in its entirety from an earlier work by someone else. Today, the Estonian politician Valery Korb is a member of the supervisory board of Ida-Viru Central Hospital in Kohtla-Jarve. All attempts to strip him of his academic degree have come to nothing.
Manipulation of images in scientific publications often ends in retraction — the formal withdrawal of a paper by a journal. The process is usually slow and can take years. The Nature paper remains under question, but a 2022 publication in Adsorption Science & Technology has already been officially retracted. Its authors included researchers from Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as an Estonian representative, the young University of Tartu scientist Ivar Zekker. The illustration below shows how the same image was used repeatedly, with only its scale, color, and placement changed.
That paper was retracted, as was another publication by Zekker, for serious violations of publication ethics, including nonexistent bibliographic references, unattributed borrowing, and the use of artificial-intelligence tools in preparing the article without disclosing that use, in violation of the journal’s editorial policy. These are not isolated episodes: experts have accumulated concerns about a whole series of Zekker’s papers. In 2021, his publication output increased by dozens of times, while researchers from Middle Eastern countries began appearing among his co-authors with increasing frequency. This pattern often points to the use of paper mills — shadow Asian markets where ready-made papers and fictitious co-authorship are sold.
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In 2023, the University of Tartu conducted and later published an anonymous survey of 354 Estonian researchers. Among other things, they were asked whether they had observed signs of research misconduct in the actions of colleagues. More than 40 percent of respondents said that colleagues had accepted “gift” authorship, while more than 10 percent had witnessed colleagues falsifying data in scientific work. These figures reflect not so much precise statistics as the troubling environment in which Estonian researchers work today.
The University of Tartu is far from the only Estonian research institution where questions have arisen about the reliability of published images. One of the most prominent figures in such cases is Sabarathinam Shanmugam, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. According to the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, roughly one in five papers involving him has become the subject of critical discussion.
One publication by Shanmugam is especially revealing. Experts found manipulation of figures in the paper. After concerns were raised, the authors replaced the illustrations several times, each time apologizing and attributing what had happened to an “unfortunate mistake.” Yet every new version again contained signs of manipulation. Eventually the exchange reached a dead end: the authors never provided convincing explanations, and discussion of the apparent fakes simply faded away. In a later paper, Shanmugam and his co-authors chose a different defense strategy, stating: The data that has been used are confidential. That position effectively deprived independent researchers of any opportunity to verify the reported results.
The story does not end there. A number of Shanmugam’s publications were later retracted after journal editors discovered that the author list had been replaced at the final stage of preparing the papers for publication. Such author substitution is considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market. While one set of “dealers” pushes a manuscript through the journal with a credible author list, another takes orders from people wishing to buy co-authorship in the almost-published paper. At the final stage, once all reviewers’ questions have been resolved, comes the climax: in the last version of the manuscript, the names of the original authors are quietly replaced, without the editors’ approval, by those who responded to the offer in time and paid. The editor, unaware of the switch, publishes the paper. The newly minted co-authors receive a publication to which they did not contribute a single line and which they most likely never even read.
Finally, Tallinn University and one of its employees, mathematics professor Jorge Eduardo Macias-Diaz, also deserve attention. In recent years, specialists have increasingly encountered papers prepared with generative artificial intelligence. In mathematics, such publications are often betrayed less by stylistic roughness than by gross errors in formulas and proofs. To a non-specialist, the text may look entirely convincing, yet mistakes already appear in the first stages of the calculations, rendering everything that follows meaningless.
Mathematics is an exact science. If the third line of a calculation contains the wrong sign, the final ten pages lose all meaning, no matter how many formulas they contain. The image below shows examples from four relatively recent papers by Macias-Diaz in which such errors appear literally in the opening lines of calculations or theorem proofs.
“Math salad” is the term specialists use for texts that look scientific on the surface because they contain an abundance of formulas and technical terminology, but on closer inspection turn out to be internally contradictory or contain errors that make their conclusions unreliable. Naturally, artificial intelligence is “to blame” for everything: the author simply gave the neural network a task and then copied the result into the paper without even checking it.
A curious manifestation of this practice emerged in a case that went far beyond university offices. Tallinn Administrative Court fined a group of plaintiffs who had cited “authoritative scientific studies” on the harms of clear-cutting in their filings. There was only one problem: both the studies and their authors had been entirely generated by a neural network. The court treated this as fabrication of evidence and fined the plaintiffs.
To conclude, here is a curious case in which nonexistent Estonian researchers appeared not only in materials before a Tallinn court, but also on the pages of scientific journals. In a paper by Chinese authors on estimating fuel-cell parameters using the metaphor-based “Grey Wolf” optimization algorithm, a co-author from Tallinn University of Technology suddenly appeared: Tekle Demsas. Apparently, adding a mysterious Estonian scientist to the author list was meant to give the paper greater weight. The deception did not last long. After checking the author’s credentials, the editors established that no such researcher actually existed. The paper was then retracted.
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Estonia, which spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, is now confronting the underside of the global crisis in academic ethics. The cases involving Ounap, Zekker, Shanmugam, and Macias-Diaz are not merely isolated scandals, but reflections of today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills, the ethics of co-authorship, and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. The results of the University of Tartu survey show that these problems are systemic.
The central problem for Estonian science is not that violations occur, but how institutions respond to them. Universities often prefer to look the other way, outsourcing the role of “academic police” to journal editors, courts, and volunteers on PubPeer. In the twenty-first century, a reputation as a scientific center can no longer be taken for granted. Maintaining zero tolerance for falsification requires daily work. And the sooner Estonian universities recognize that responsibility, the fewer reasons for sarcasm they will leave to those watching them.
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The European Commission has adopted a Communication on a new Strategic Approach to Research and Innovation for competitive, resilient and sustainable agriculture, forestry, rural areas and food systems. This strategic document brings together two closely interlinked frameworks, to guide future research, innovation, deployment and uptake across the entire agri-food sector. These frameworks are AgRI 2040, focusing on agriculture, forestry and rural areas, and Food 2040, focusing on food systems, including fisheries and aquaculture.
The Communication aims to strengthen the agri-food innovation ecosystem from early-stage research and innovation to deployment and market uptake, and to accelerate the uptake of knowledge and innovation across the entire sector. It puts greater emphasis on users’ challenges and needs and on the delivery of real impact on the ground by bringing together multiple actors including end users, researchers and businesses, to co-create, test and demonstrate solutions in real-world settings. This will also help startups, scaleups and SMEs to move promising innovations closer to the market.
The Communication will help turn Europe’s scientific excellence into practical solutions for farmers, foresters, rural communities, researchers, food businesses and consumers, for a more competitive, resilient and sustainable agri-food sector. It contributes to the objectives of the Vision for Agriculture and Food and the Strategy for European Life Sciences and complements the EU Bioeconomy Strategy by supporting innovation and sustainable value creation.
By developing the AgRI 2040 and Food 2040 frameworks, a common strategic approach for EU-funded R&I that enables competitive, sustainable, resilient and fair agri-food systems will be ensured. Both frameworks will be deployed under Horizon Europe 2028-2034 and relevant parts of the European Competitiveness Fund.
Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen said:
"Research and innovation can make a real difference to how we farm and manage our rural areas: from crops that can better withstand drought and extreme temperatures, to faster ways of detecting plant diseases, more sustainable crop protection and digital tools for smarter use of resources like water. Our task is to make sure these ideas do not stay in the laboratory, but are tested, adapted to local conditions and turned into practical solutions that can be used and scaled up. In this way, research can have a real impact on the ground, helping farmers and foresters respond to new challenges and build a more competitive, resilient and sustainable agri-food sector."
Startups, Research and Innovation Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva said:
"Europe is leading in science and research, but too many breakthrough solutions still struggle to reach consumers and markets. The ultimate goal is to help innovators, start-ups and businesses turn bold ideas into innovative solutions that boost competitiveness, strengthen food security, food safety, sustainability and resilience, and deliver real benefits for people and the planet. Europe can lead with confidence, unity and ambition."
The next major milestone will be the EU AgRI 2040 Conference – “Future-proofing EU Agri-Food through research and innovation”, taking place in Brussels on 24 and 25 September. Christophe Hansen, Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, and Ekaterina Zaharieva, Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, will open the conference, which will bring together key stakeholders from across the agri-food sector and the research and innovation community to contribute to shaping future EU research and innovation priorities.
The new Strategic Approach brings the Vision for Agriculture and Food and the Strategy for European Life Sciences together to cover agriculture, forestry, rural areas and food systems, providing long-term policy direction without prejudging the next EU budget negotiations.
The agri-food sector is strategically important for Europe’s food safety and security, jobs and skills, competitiveness and strategic autonomy. It faces increasing challenges from climate change, resource constraints, geopolitical instability, labour and skills shortages, changing consumer attitudes and global competition.
AgRI 2040 will focus on agriculture, forestry and rural areas. Its eight preliminary areas of action will cover soils and agri-ecosystems, cropping and livestock systems, the bioeconomy, multifunctional forests, rural areas and stronger agri-food value chains, as well as digitalisation, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Food 2040 will focus on food systems, including fisheries and aquaculture. Its six areas of action will address place-based food systems; healthy and sustainable diets; resource efficiency and zero pollution in food systems; food environments and consumer empowerment; scaling innovations, business models and fair food systems solutions; and aquatic food.
The two frameworks are guided by six shared priorities: competitiveness, startups and scaleups; food security, resilience and preparedness; natural resources and circularity; food and feed safety, nutrition and health; fairness; and global cooperation. Common enablers include governance, technologies, and territories and communities.
The Commission Staff Working Document accompanying this Communication provides the evidence base for the new approach. It assesses the achievements, investments, results and implementation experience of the 2016 strategic approach to agricultural research and innovation, and the Food 2030 framework.
Stakeholder consultations highlighted the need for stronger links between research, deployment and market uptake, better alignment with users’ needs, improved monitoring and governance, and greater attention to competitiveness, resilience, sustainability, strategic autonomy, health, circularity, fairness and public trust. Their engagement will continue as AgRI 2040 and Food 2040 are implemented.
Future-proofing EU agri-food through research & innovation
Um acidente com um trator agrícola provocou um ferido grave na noite desta terça-feira, dia 8 de setembro, no concelho de Salvaterra de Magos, freguesia de Muge
O alerta para a ocorrência foi dado pelas 20h58, mobilizando de imediato os meios de socorro para o local. Segundo informação prestada pelas autoridades, após a devida estabilização, a vítima recebeu assistência da equipa médica da Viatura Médica de Emergência e Reanimação (VMER) do Hospital Distrital de Santarém, unidade hospitalar para onde acabou por ser transportada em estado grave.
Nas operações de socorro estiveram envolvidos 11 operacionais e quatro veículos dos Bombeiros Voluntários de Salvaterra de Magos e do Instituto Nacional de Emergência Médica (INEM). A Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR) esteve presente na ocorrência e assumiu a investigação para apurar as causas que estiveram na origem do despiste.
Por: Dino Frazão
09/09/2026
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The European Commission wants to cut the EU’s public procurement rulebook from around 900 pages to 200, in a sweeping reform that aims to simplify tendering while giving governments greater scope to favour European economic and security interests, writes Catherine Feore.
Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné held up the existing body of rules alongside its much slimmer replacement, to illustrate his point.
“These here are the European rules which currently govern public procurement in Europe: 900 pages,” he said. “And this is what we are proposing today… down to 200 pages.”
The proposed Public Procurement Act would replace three EU procurement directives with a single regulation, with a view to simplifying procurement provisions spread across 26 sectoral laws and cutting the number of procedures from five to three.
The Commission estimates the changes could save businesses and public authorities €650 million a year in administrative costs.
The reform matters because of Europe’s massive purchasing power involved. EU public procurement exceeds €2.5 trillion annually, around 15% of EU GDP, covering everything from trains and hospitals to energy infrastructure, schools and IT systems.
From lowest price to strategic purchasing
The proposal is not just about cutting red tape. Brussels wants governments to use their purchasing power more strategically.
The Best Price-Quality Ratio would become the standard method for awarding contracts, with quality normally accounting for at least 30% of the assessment and 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Authorities could consider environmental and social performance, innovation, security and resilience alongside price.
The commitment to a so-called European preference has been tempered by the EU’s international commitments, but access can be restricted when a country doesn’t reciprocate market access. Restrictions could also be imposed where reliance on foreign suppliers creates security-of-supply dependencies or threatens EU economic security.
“European public money should, wherever possible, create jobs, investment and opportunities in Europe rather than filling the order books of our competitors,” Séjourné said.
Five procurement procedures would become three: open, dynamic and innovation procedures. Each would allow negotiation between buyers and bidders.
The Commission also plans an integrated EU digital procurement marketplace connecting national e-procurement platforms. A company registered through one connected system should be able to bid elsewhere in Europe without repeatedly submitting the same documentation. This is intended to reduce bureaucracy and tackle one of the current system's weaknesses: too little competition, particularly from SMEs and companies bidding across borders.
National, regional and local priorities may appreciate this flexibility in theory, but constrained budgets often mean that price will remain the bottom line for many. This legislation offers greater freedom in determining needs, but it remains to be seen what its impact will be.
PHOTO CREDIT: European Commission Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné says the rules reduced from 900 pages to 200 pages © European Union
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is set to sign long-delayed agreements with five oil refineries, unlocking more than $6 billion in planned upgrades to modernize aging plants and cut reliance on fuel imports, officials said. But industry warnings that changes to the financial framework could derail the projects overshadowed the announcement. The agreements with Pak-Arab Refinery Ltd., Pakistan ... Read more
The post Pakistan to sign long-delayed refinery deals unlocking more than $6 billion in planned upgrades appeared first on BOL News.
A senior official within Greece’s National Intelligence Service (EYP), Yiannis Papadopoulos, on Tuesday filed a criminal complaint with the Athens First Instance Court Prosecutor’s Office over the targeting of his phone using Predator spyware. In this, he accuses the four business executives convicted at first instance over the phone surveillance case with a series of […]
The post Greece’s National Intelligence officer files criminal complaint following Predator spyware surveillance appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
The EU agri-food sector expanded its positive trade balance in the first six months of 2026, with a trade surplus of €23.9 billion, €1.4 billion higher than in the same time period in 2025. Cumulative exports for January–June totalled €117.2 billion, down by 2% compared with 2025, mainly due to declines in values of exports of cocoa products, pigmeat and olive oil.
Cumulative exports to Egypt increased by €278 million (+28%) year-on-year, driven mainly by wheat, while exports to Ukraine rose by €247 million (+12%) and those to India by €174 million (+26%). Trade with Gulf countries was impacted by the disruption to maritime routes through the Strait of Hormuz, with exports to the United Arab Emirates falling by €395 million (-25%). Among product categories, exports of spirits and liqueurs increased by €405 million (+10%) while exports of coffee, tea, cocoa and spices fell by €1.1 billion (-16%).
Cumulative imports reached €93.4 billion, down €3.6 billion (-4%) year-on-year. Despite this, imports from Brazil increased by €425 million (+5%), mainly due to higher soya bean imports, while imports from Argentina and Guatemala also rose. Among product categories, imports of coffee, tea, cocoa and spices fell by €3.6 billion (-17%), while cereal imports declined by €715 million (-15%). By contrast, imports of fruit and nuts increased by €503 million (+3%), while sunflower seed imports doubled following two poor EU crop years.
The widening EU agri-food trade surplus underlines the sector's continued competitiveness and ability to adapt to changing market conditions.
More insights as well as detailed tables are available below in the latest edition of the monthly EU agri-food trade report.
CEO Ali Asghar Jamali said the 33% increase in vehicle sales reflected a recovery in market demand.
The post Indus Motor profit rises as vehicle sales reach 45,035 units appeared first on BOL News.
The hearing gave consumers and investors an opportunity to share their experiences directly.
The post CCP records competition concerns at open hearing on real estate sector appeared first on BOL News.
When Sabrina Imbler’s cat, Melon, becomes seriously ill with what is later confirmed as feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), Imbler feels she doesn’t have time to wait for a formal diagnosis and turns to a Facebook group that connects desperate cat owners with a black‑market treatment: GS‑441524. Injecting Melon twice a day at home, they enter a frantic stretch in which the acidic drug causes a wound to open on Melon’s back, and she is sentenced to weeks in a hated recovery suit called a Suitical: “Melon was so upset that she lay on her side like a tipped cow for hours, her chin glumly fixed to the carpet.” With Melon finally fully recovered, Imbler has the space to look back on the desperate measures it took to save her.
The FIP Warriors contact met me in the lobby of their building, wearing a knit cap with cat ears. They proceeded to demonstrate how to deliver the medicine on their stuffed cat, Edward. I watched as they manipulated the stuffed toy, lifting up pockets in Edward’s “skin” into which I was to drive a 22-gauge needle at an angle into subcutaneous tissue. I paid $50 for two vials of injectable GS-441524, which was acidic to keep it shelf-stable. This acidity, the contact warned me, meant the injections burned. “It’s really best if you have help,” they told me. “Will you have help?” No, I told them. My ex was out of town and it was just me and Melon. “Well, you’ll figure something out,” they said. I would have to.
In recent years, Serbia has appeared more and more often in news stories about violations of research ethics: plagiarism in the dissertations of high-ranking officials, purchased authorship, mass retractions of publications, dubious international collaborations, and studies verging on scientific curiosities. And also — mass political persecution of scholars and university teachers. Are these episodes accidental, or are they manifestations of one and the same problem? Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation.
Any account of the current situation with academic misconduct in Serbia has to begin with the story of the doctoral dissertation of Sinisa Mali, then the mayor of Belgrade and now the country’s first deputy prime minister. After “terrible plagiarism” was found in his work, the familiar bureaucratic game began: academic bodies dragged out a decision for years. But in the end, under public pressure and in the face of irrefutable evidence, the ethics committee of the University of Belgrade did annul his doctoral degree. By that time, Mali had already become finance minister. Soon afterward, Serbia’s Constitutional Court overturned the university’s decision. Apparently having lost faith in his own country’s academic system, Mali — by then Serbia’s first deputy prime minister — went to defend a new dissertation… in Slovakia. The Serbian authorities immediately recognized the Slovak diploma. The saga has been going on for more than a decade, and it is not over yet. But it has already become a textbook example of how political weight can cast doubt on the very idea of academic integrity.
Not all stories about plagiarism in the work of Serbian officials end well. Filip Svarm, editor-in-chief of the weekly Vreme, and journalist Nemanja Rujevic, who published the investigation “Anatomy of a Dissertation,” were less fortunate. Former politician Jelena Trivan, now CEO of Serbia’s largest mobile operator and the subject of that investigation, sued the journalists at the end of 2024 and won 80,000 dinars for an infringement of her honor, dignity, and business reputation. At the same time, the court did not question the fact of the borrowings themselves. It concluded, however, that only specialists have the right to classify a scholarly work as plagiarism, while journalists do not have such authority.
University of Belgrade professor Aleksandar Kavcic called what was happening “a war of laypeople against scientists”: a country where ignorance is celebrated and ministers are people who “like to wave around purchased and plagiarized diplomas.”
Plagiarism in Serbia’s academic environment is not limited to politicians’ dissertations. The buying and selling of scientific publications is an even more acute problem. This may be why Professor Kavcic, speaking of colleagues in the field, diplomatically noted that the difference between a real scientist and someone who has acquired knowledge “third hand” is enormous.
Plagiat-Navigator has already written about such “third hands” — the Moscow exchange trading in scientific publications and authorship slots — in the article “Hirsch Index at Market Rate.” One of the figures in that story was Marko Milojevic, a professor at Singidunum University in Belgrade. The case concerned two publications in international scientific journals in which Milojevic purchased authorship in 2021 through the Moscow exchange. A closer analysis shows that, in at least six publications, Professor Milojevic shares authorship with Russian colleagues who regularly use the services of the Moscow firm.
Yet the Moscow trail is only the tip of the iceberg. Following a global trend, Serbian scholars have recently shifted from the Russian market to the more powerful and influential Asian markets for fake publications. In a recent study of retracted papers with Iranian affiliations in computer science, the authors concluded that Serbia ranks among the leaders in the number of jointly published questionable papers, second only to Malaysia. This is hardly surprising: the “paper mill” from the Iranian city of Ardabil, exposed in 2023, also worked actively with Serbian colleagues. The result was the mass retraction of 31 papers in Genetika, the official journal of the Serbian Genetics Society, which lost its impact factor because of “compromised” peer review and citation manipulation.
Manipulation of peer review, authorship, and citation in publications by Serbian scholars has been observed not only in Genetika. Several examples of such papers, retracted from various journals for this reason, are shown below. It should be noted that Russian scientists also appeared as co-authors alongside their Serbian colleagues in these papers.
The compromising of publication procedures is only one item in a long list of dishonest practices used to pull the wool over the eyes of journal reviewers and editors.
Consider another characteristic example: in 2024, experts found numerous distortions of established scientific expressions — so-called tortured phrases — in a paper by Professor Nebojsa Bacanin, vice-rector for research at Belgrade’s Singidunum University. This is a clear sign that the authors were trying to evade plagiarism-detection systems using automated paraphrasing. But, as often happens, the software malfunctioned: it paraphrased the text while leaving abbreviations unchanged, so that they no longer matched their expansions. For example, instead of convolutional neural network (CNN), the text produced the meaningless phrase convolutional brain organization (CNN). Such blunders are the calling card of texts written not by scientists but by algorithms. Incidentally, another paper by Vice-Rector Bacanin was found to contain numerous manipulations with irrelevant bibliographic references.
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The problem, however, is not only how the articles are written, but also how their number is artificially inflated. The inflation of publication activity in Serbian science does not do without a zoo — and what follows is not a figure of speech. The use of metaheuristics inspired by animal behavior is a frequently used method for artificially increasing the number of publications. Many such algorithms are described extremely superficially, while their novelty and applicability to a wide range of tasks raise serious doubts. In most cases, the proposed method differs little from long-known algorithms, and its supposed originality comes down to a new metaphor and fresh terminology. A significant share of such works are merely minor modifications of the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization method.
A telling example: in a 2026 paper by scientists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Serbia, the authors took an interest in the behavior of the spider-tailed horned viper and applied this metaphor to photovoltaic water-pumping systems. It sounds like science fiction, but it is a real publication in a scientific journal. Notably, among the co-authors of the paper we once again find the already familiar Professor Bacanin, vice-rector of Singidunum University.
Nor is the story free of image manipulation. In a joint Iranian-Italian article whose authors include a single representative of Serbia — University of Belgrade professor Jelena Popovic-Djordjevic — experts found telltale traces of Photoshop, the same techniques that have surfaced more than once in similar scandals.
It is worth noting that since 2020 Popovic-Djordjevic has been a constant co-author of Sina Moghaddam, an Iranian specialist in medicinal plants. The scheme is transparent: the participation of European scientists helps Asian authors break into prestigious journals. At the same time, the real contribution of the Western colleagues to the research is often minimal. Their role is reduced to status presence — a kind of “wedding general” at an academic wedding. Until 2020, this honorary function in Moghaddam’s publications was performed by a researcher from Greece. The outcome was entirely predictable: nine of their joint papers have already been retracted, and they have received scathing criticism on Retraction Watch. Now the baton has passed to Popovic-Djordjevic.
It should be added that image manipulation in her papers is not only an Iranian specialty. In a paper signed by ten employees of the University of Belgrade, a curious fact emerged: an image previously used to illustrate liver samples migrated unchanged into a new article — this time as an illustration of kidney samples. The authors were not at a loss: they apologized for an “unfortunate error” and corrected the article.
[[socialnetworks]]
The roots of this tradition of errors, however, run deeper. Back in 2003, one of the co-authors of the aforementioned paper about the liver — now a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Belgrade, and then a researcher at Queen Mary University of London — Zoran Todorovic, together with his British colleague Christoph Thiemermann, published a paper in which experts also found image manipulation, again involving liver samples. In response to puzzled questions from reviewers, Professor Thiemermann replied with lethal directness: the results of the study, by his own admission, “may not be reliable.” Since then, more than 80 negative PubPeer comments have accumulated on his papers, 15 of which have ultimately been retracted. Techniques honed at a British university, it seems, proved useful in Belgrade twenty years later.
One reliable sign of dishonest publication activity is a sharp rise in the number of papers co-authored with representatives of countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, around 2021–2022. In such papers, authorship is often shared by researchers from a good dozen countries — a kind of academic international, assembled by chance around a single publication.
The graph above shows the distribution of the number of papers by Serbian authors co-authored with colleagues from Asia and Africa, depending on the number of co-authoring countries. By a large margin, the leaders in the number of papers are two mathematicians from the University of Belgrade: Professors Dragan Pamucar and Vladimir Simic. The sharp surge in their publication activity falls precisely at the beginning of the 2020s. And if experts find elementary mathematical errors in their papers, there is nothing surprising about it: at a productivity rate of three papers a week, it is simply impossible not to make mistakes. PubPeer has already accumulated claims against a hundred of their publications in international journals, ten of which have now been officially retracted. It seems that in this case quantity really did turn into quality.
To conclude this theme, let us talk a little with plants — yes, yes, do not be surprised. Scientists from Slovenia, Serbia (the universities in Nis and Belgrade), and the University of Pristina decided to find out together whether plants are capable of talking to people in their own language. To do this, they attached a polygraph to the stem of a potted flower and asked the plant questions: “Are you alive?”, “Do you have consciousness?”, “Does it hurt?” The plant was interrogated using a radioactive source of a uranium isotope. The answers obtained were decoded with the help of AI, which translated them into Serbian. To avoid suffering from radiation themselves, the authors of the study used a homemade orgonite — a bioenergetic shield that transforms negative energy into positive energy.
The researchers’ first important discovery was observing how the experimental “vegetable” — this is exactly how they familiarly referred to the potted plant under study — sweated and changed its pulse and breathing rate. All of this was recorded using a polygraph. As a result, the Balkan scientists concluded that plants can be engaged in a rational dialogue in their own language. The results of the study were published in a scientific journal devoted to issues of… acupuncture.
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Behind all these scandalous stories, it should not be forgotten that the majority of Serbian scientists and university teachers are honest professionals who have nothing to do with plagiarism, purchased papers, or other manipulations. The events of the past two years have clearly confirmed this: many of them proved willing to risk their own careers in defense of academic freedoms and democratic principles.
The mass student protests that began in Serbia in November 2024 after the collapse of a canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad quickly grew into a nationwide movement against corruption and political pressure on state institutions. Universities became one of the main centers of protest activity: lecturers openly supported the students, while rectors and deans refused to obstruct university blockades. In response, the authorities and pro-government media launched a campaign against the academic community.
Political pressure was not limited to public attacks. At a number of universities, teachers who spoke out in support of students faced refusals to reappoint them, dismissals, and delays in career advancement. The best-known case was that of Jelena Kleut, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, who lost her job after twenty years of teaching; she herself called what happened a political reprisal. These actions by the Serbian authorities, aimed at suppressing academic freedoms, attracted the attention of international organizations: the European Parliament and the human rights network Scholars at Risk documented an escalation of threats against Serbian scholars, publishing reports on a systemic crisis of freedom of speech.
All these stories are elements of a single ecosystem in which formal indicators replace real science, violations meet no serious resistance, and universities and courts sometimes side with the violators. Politicians themselves, by their own example, have demonstrated for decades that academic integrity is worth nothing if you have power. With this signal, they have been corroding the academic community for years, setting “their own” careerists against those who refused to play their game. It would be a mistake to think that the entire academic community has resigned itself to this state of affairs. But, unfortunately, for now the dialogue between the former and the latter looks more like a conversation with plants.
The post “Are You Alive?” Talking Plants, Purchased Papers, and Repression: What Is Happening to Serbian Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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