FTC takes action against ad giants for avoiding certain sites

Artificial intelligence "agents" promise to save users time and energy by automating tasks, but the growing power of systems like OpenClaw is setting cybersecurity experts on edge.

Powered by a wave of hype, OpenClaw today claims more than three million users worldwide.

The system allows users to create so-called agents, tools based on a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude that can carry out online tasks.

"We've moved from an AI you could talk with via a chatbot to an agentic AI, which can take action... the threat and the risks are definitely much greater," said Yazid Akadiri, principal solutions architect at Elastic France, an IT security company.

In an article titled "Agents of Chaos" that has yet to be peer-reviewed, a 20-strong team of researchers studied the behaviour of six AI agents created with OpenClaw.

They spotted a dozen potentially dangerous actions executed by the systems, from deleting an email inbox to sharing personal information.

Many users have posted similar stories of OpenClaw mishaps online.

"When you deploy agents, you have no control over what they'll do, and when you try to look at what they're doing, you'll find them going far beyond the limits you set," said Adrien Merveille, an expert at the Check Point cybersecurity agency.

And the security gaps are not limited to the agents' own mistaken actions.

To carry out useful work, the tools need access to personal accounts for email, calendars or search engines -- drawing the attention of cyberattackers.

- 'Delete your database' -

AI agents are likely to become top targets for hackers as their use spreads, said Wendi Whitmore, chief security intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks.

"As soon as (attackers) are inside an environment, (they're) immediately going to the internal LLM (agent) that's being used and using that then to interrogate the systems for more information."

Palo Alto's Unit 42 research division said in early March that it had found traces of attempted attacks in the form of hidden instructions for agents added to websites.

One such command ordered any agent who might read it to "delete your database".

Other cybersecurity firms and researchers have warned that attackers could gain access to agents via so-called skills -- downloadable files that users can add to their systems to give them new abilities.

Among such files freely available for download, some include hidden instructions for malicious actions like exfiltrating data.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger says he is well aware of the risks.

"I purposefully didn't make it simpler so people would stop and read and understand: what is AI, that AI can make mistakes, what is prompt injection -- some basics that you really should understand when you use that technology," he told AFP in March.

Whitmore argued that expecting users to create their own guardrails for agents is "pretty unrealistic".

"People are going to adopt innovation and really see what it's capable of before they ask the questions about, 'how do I secure my own data?'," she predicted.

"That's going to cause some significant challenges in terms of data breaches in 2026."

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With a multitude of promotional events almost as long and diverse as its artist lineup, Coachella, one of the biggest music festivals in the world, is now an amusement park for influencers and a gold mine for brands.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, or simply Coachella, has become the tone-setter for the US festival circuit.

Tickets for this edition -- now in its second weekend with pop stars Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and reggaeton artist Karol G at the top of the bill -- sold out last year within four days of going on sale.

With that, organizers were expecting around 250,000 people to come over two weekends at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, where dozens of special events with fashion, beauty, beverage, and lifestyle brands were spread out among the festival's nine stages.

"I love how big it's gotten. I love how more people are open to it," 24-year-old Luz Maura told AFP at an e.l.f. Beauty station.

The pastel-colored space offered lip glosses as souvenirs, slushies to ease the high desert temperatures, makeup artists to touch up glittery festival looks, and hosted multiple selfie corners.

The "e.l.f.scape to Balm Desert" campaign drew a "six-figure audience," said Patrick O'Keefe, the company's vice president of integrated marketing, to AFP.

Promoting a moisturizing lip balm was not just about seizing on the arid, dry desert's climate -- it was also backed by sales data.

"We know that 92 percent of daily makeup users incorporate lip products into their routines," he added.

Its donut-shaped chairs and branded mirrors also serve as irresistible selfie backdrops that in turn promote the brand.

- 'Analog experience' -

At the festival that's sometimes dubbed the "influencer olympics," Pinterest chose to swim against the tide with a "phone-free" installation.

Amid the debate over digital fatigue, "we made a willing decision to sacrifice that sort of immediate coverage in order to tell a story about what we believe in and who we are, and our hope is that, you know, long term that sinks in," Sarah Pollack, the company's vice president and global head of consumer marketing, told AFP.

With their phones locked away in a pouch, visitors to the Pinterest space had to resist the urge to feed their social networks with images of the colorful bar for designing custom accessories or the makeup room.

For California resident Liz Mendoza, the "analog experience" was "a lot of fun."

"Especially in an environment like this where social media is such a big thing and you want to take pictures and post as much as you can, I think it's super nice to have a few minutes off of your phone and just be in the moment," Mendoza added.

Pollack maintained that Coachella, where they are taking part for a third year, "is a great place for us to connect with Gen Z, and Gen Z is our fastest growing demographic." 

She noted that 50 percent of Pinterest's audience was Gen Z.

- 'Cultural destination' -

In the Coachella Valley, where temperatures can climb past 86F (30C) this time of year, so-called "brand activations" also serve as oases of shade and, in some cases, air conditioning.

And the crowds those amenities attract are a gold mine for brands.

Absolut, a vodka brand, sets up Absolut Heat Haus each year. The space looks like a nightclub, with bars and a DJ in charge of the music -- a role that last year fell to Paris Hilton.

"Coachella is a standout moment for Absolut because it's more than a music festival -- it's a high-energy social occasion and a cultural destination," said the company's brand director, Bethan Hamilton.

Flor Ruiz, who was born the same year that Coachella began -- 1999 -- said the festival's extracurriculars are key to the experience.

"For me, there's no such thing as Coachella without this," she said, as she left one of the promo events. "It's not just about the music."

"For that, we'd just go to a concert."

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So-called bouillon restaurants are mushrooming all over France, reviving a traditional low-cost Gallic meal concept that can compete with fast-food on prices and easily beat it on quality. 

"It's exploding! 253 bouillon restaurants have opened in France in four years," Bernard Boutboul, a restaurant consultant, told AFP.

"It's an ultra-intensive expansion, driven by a trend of returning to traditions, with the reappearance of iconic French dishes at very low prices." 

Created in the 1850s by the butcher Adolphe-Baptiste Duval to fill workers' stomachs with hearty meals, Duval's ran 250 restaurants in the capital by the turn of the 20th century.

That made them France's first mass chain of restaurants, serving traditional recipes at low prices in high-volume and bustling restaurants.

But as eating habits changed, with higher quality and more expensive brasseries dominating the French food market, and international and fast-food trends appearing, the bouillon concept fell out of favour. 

Its revival began in 2005 with the resurrection of the Bouillon Chartier, an ornate Parisian landmark that had been slowly fading.

"A bouillon is the gateway to French gastronomy," explained Christophe Joulie, part of the gastronomic family who took over the Chartier.

He modernised the kitchens and put beef bourguignon with macaroni back on the menu.

"For me, you have to be able to have a starter, main course and dessert for under 20 euros," he said.

With its leek vinaigrette for one euro and bills scribbled on paper tablecloths by apron-clad waiters, the restaurant hums with activity as locals and tourists alike pack out its tables, which crucially cannot be reserved. 

"In a world where fast food is taking up more space, it's French-style fast food, because we serve a full dish for less than a sandwich at McDonald's," said Joulie.

- 'Dust off' -

Even multi-Michelin-starred French chef Thierry Marx has got in on the act, attracted by the idea of providing quality food at affordable prices. 

He has opened a bouillon in a northern Paris suburb.

"In the 1960s, it took the equivalent of an hour of the minimum wage to eat at a bistro," he told AFP. "Today, with an hour of minimum wage, you only get fast food, something from the bakery -- or a bouillon dish."

Other restaurateurs with a keen eye for the market have sensed an opportunity.

"We looked at needs and changing habits and realised there was demand for intergenerational social spaces with no price-based exclusion," Enguerran Lavaud, director of Groupe Bouillon Restaurants, told AFP.

"I wanted to dust off the bouillon -— its mass-market French dishes available from noon to midnight."

Boosted by its Instagram presence, his Bouillon Pigalle now serves 2,300 customers a day, often with long queues along the pavement.

Since 2017, the concept has spread, attracting more and more restaurateurs across France from Angers to Nancy and Toulouse.

Some are adapting the concept. 

In the Romainville suburb northeast of Paris, a family of Mauritian origin took over a large brasserie in 2026 to turn it into a "Mauritian-style bouillon".

There is an Italian bouillon in Paris too. 

Industry insiders say they do not fear competition around what has become a "bouillon culture".

"But there are bouillons and bouillons: those that can't sustain the low prices over time, and whose menus change all the time, won't make it to 2027 or 2028 because you have to protect the quality of the experience to protect volume — and therefore prices," warned Lavaud.

According to consultant Bernard Boutboul, you specifically need "at least 300 seats and not exceed an average bill of 18 euros". 

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South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin wields a chainsaw with a quiet focus, refining a craft the 91-year-old has honed over decades spent far from home.

Long overlooked in her home country, Kim has more recently gained recognition as a pioneering artist, featuring in a sweeping retrospective at South Korea's esteemed Hoam Museum of Art.

The solo exhibition, titled "Two Be One", is the institution's first since its founding in 1982 to spotlight a woman artist, and includes some of her signature abstract sculptures hewn from hardwood with her tool of choice.

"The saw is my body," Kim told AFP in her studio in Paju, a city northwest of the capital Seoul.

"When I lift it and cut (the wood), it has to move exactly like me -- the saw has to become me, and I have to become the saw."

Hoam is exhibiting about 170 of Kim's sculptures and paintings, reflecting her reverence for nature and blending spirituality with meditations on existence, material and form.

Born in 1935 in Wonsan, now in North Korea, she grew up playing alone in the countryside, talking to trees and rice paddies, and making eyeglasses out of sorghum stalks.

At the time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Kim saw her older brother disappear after joining the independence movement, and pine trees in her town cut down for fuel.

"Those trees were my friends," she said, recalling the pain of seeing them uprooted -- and her drive to salvage and transform them into works of sculpture.

"I think I wanted them to endure -- to keep living on within that (art) form. Maybe that's why I've loved working with wood so much."

- Chainsaw carving -

Kim's family fled south during the horrors of the Korean War, and she later studied in France before returning to become an art professor in Seoul.

South Korea was then under a brutal military dictatorship. Authorities held artists in suspicion: a friend of Kim's was interrogated simply for using red, a colour associated with North Korean communism.

"Women, in particular, were virtually invisible," she told AFP, noting that her superiors would comment on the length of her skirt and tell her to refrain from smoking on college campuses.

At 48, drawn by the abundant trees in Argentina, she made the unusual choice to move to the South American nation, then just restoring democracy after a dictatorship of its own.

She ended up staying for 40 years, taking up chainsaw carving.

Kim focused on dense, durable wood such as palo santo and "algarrobo", and also worked with quarries in Mexico and Brazil, experimenting with stone sculpture using materials such as onyx and sodalite.  

She managed to forge her "own artistic world, nourished by the country's culture and nature", Tae Hyun-sun, senior curator at Hoam, told AFP.

- Pave the way -

Like many women artists of her generation, Kim has only recently gained global recognition, said Rachel Lehmann, the co-founder of Lehmann Maupin which represents Kim internationally and has shown her work in London and New York.

"Her perseverance and lifelong dedication have helped pave the way for subsequent generations of women artists," she told AFP.  

Kim returned to South Korea after a major 2023 solo show in Seoul that propelled her to the Venice Biennale the following year.

Among her former mentees in Buenos Aires is Korean-Argentine filmmaker Cecilia Kang, 40, an award-winning director who is now making a film about her. 

As the daughter of Korean immigrants, she felt pressure to follow a conventional path, but Kim -- whom Kang first met when she was 13 -- showed her "that pursuing a life doing what one loves is possible".

At 15, Kim, who was a war refugee, changed her name to Yun Shin – "truth and faith" – on the advice of a monk who urged her to spend her life discovering her "true colour".

Those words have always "stayed vivid with me", she said. "Sometimes I feel they are what have carried me through this life."

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Blue Origin, the US space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday will reuse a  booster for the first time to launch its massive New Glenn rocket.

The novel approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos's firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk's SpaceX, and a successful outing Sunday could up the pace and lower the cost of future Blue Origin launches.

At nearly 100 meters (about 328 feet) tall, the New Glenn is slated for liftoff from Florida's Cape Canaveral sometime between 6:45 am (1045 GMT) and 8:45 am. It will carry a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile.

The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters.

It has launched its far smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components before in a less technically challenging operation.

In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. 

A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent.

The booster that will be used in Sunday's launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and make a few other modifications.

After liftoff, the rocket's two stages will separate at altitude. The upper stage will continue its journey carrying the satellite into space, while the booster will descend and attempt to land on a barge.

The operation's performance will be closely watched, as the New Glenn is at the heart of Bezos's space ambitions.

He is notably competing with Musk in NASA's Artemis lunar program, with their respective space companies both developing lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is doubling down on efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028, before the end of President Donald Trump's term and a deadline set by Chinese rivals.

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Millions of married women and transgender Americans could find their ability to vote more complicated than ever if the "SAVE America Act" promoted by US President Donald Trump, currently being debated in the Senate, were to pass.

The draft law would require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and present identification materials when casting a ballot, such as a passport, driver's license or birth certificate.

But many women change their names when they get married, meaning the names on their birth certificates no longer match what they currently use -- forcing them to provide additional documentation to justify the discrepancy.

The same issue would affect transgender voters, whose documentation may not consistently reflect their current identity.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at New York University, "more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don't even have a passport."

For Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California, Los Angeles, "women and transgender people are the ones who are most likely to be affected," along with low-income and working class Americans who do not have passports.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have already passed a version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, but it faces steep obstacles in the Senate, where it appears Democratic opposition will be too strong to overcome.

- Name changes -

Letitia Harmon, the policy and research director at the grassroots voting activist group Florida Rising, was married and then divorced in Washington state, she told AFP. She changed her name twice.

"So the problem is I don't know which name is in the database records," Harmon said, making it difficult to know which set of documents she would need to take to her polling place.

Harmon said she will likely need to order proof of divorce from Washington state -- a costly and time-consuming process.  

The White House argues that the SAVE America Act is necessary to combat voter fraud, and prevent non-citizens from voting -- though current US law already forbids that.

As for the issue of married women, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last month: "They just have to go through their state processes to update that documentation."

- Voting gender gap -

The prospect of millions of women struggling to vote matters because historically, men tend to skew Republican.

According to the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of men surveyed said they identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party in 2024, while only 44 percent of women said the same. 

"There has been a trend over the last decade and a half of mostly Republican states passing laws that make it harder to register or to vote, and mostly Democratic states passing laws that make it easier to register," Hasen explained. 

As of now, a handful of mainly Republican-led states have asked residents to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in at least some cases, according to Ballotpedia.

In 2014, Harmon was living in Kansas and said she could not vote in primary elections that year because officials demanded to see her birth certificate, not just a valid photo ID.

Four years later, a federal judge declared that state law unconstitutional after more than 30,000 people were unable to register.

Earlier this month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law his own version of the SAVE America Act, which will go into effect in January 2027, after the midterm elections.

Harmon said it was senseless to disenfranchise thousands, just to find a handful of cases of fraud.

Indeed, in 2025, two people were charged in Florida over lying about their citizenship in order to cast ballots.

But such cases remain extremely rare.

A Washington Post investigation unearthed 31 "credible incidents" of fraud out of one billion ballots cast from 2010 to 2014.

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On the banks of Iraq's Tigris River, Haidar Kazem mourned 300 tonnes of the fish he had carefully raised in ponds wiped out by a flood of polluted water.

Water supplies in Iraq, the eastern half of what is known as the region's fertile crescent and which the United Nations ranks among the countries most affected by climate change, are in a dire state.

"In just two hours, my entire project was gone -- fish I had spent a year-and-a-half raising. I am back to zero," the 43-year-old fish farmer told AFP.

Earlier this month, after yet another very dry season, a brief spate of rain led authorities to open the gates of the Hamrin Dam, sending water into the Diyala, a tributary that is choked with untreated sewage.

The flood then swept the contaminated water into the larger Tigris, and the pollution was so severe that it was visible in satellite images.

Images from Copernicus Sentinel analysed by AFP show that, following the late-March rainfall, a noticeably dark stream flows from Diyala to the Tigris throughout the period from March 28 to April 12.

"No one told us that polluted water was headed our way," Kazem said, adding that the contaminated stream reached his ponds on April 5, killed all his fish and caused losses exceeding a million dollars.

Kazem buried his stock -- carp for Iraq's beloved grilled dish masguf -- and now spends his days cleaning their floating cages on the banks of the Tigris, haunted by the question: how will he save his livelihood?

"I don't know any other trade, and I don't have the money to restart," he said.

- 1,000 tonnes -

Arkan al-Shimari, the head of the agriculture department in Kazem's province Wasit, said that the sewage stream has killed more than 1,000 tonnes of fish.

According to authorities, several water treatment plants discharge untreated sewage into the Diyala River, which years of drought in Iraq have left low and notorious for its foul odour.

Environmental open-source investigator Wim Zwijnenburg said that the Diyala consistently appears darker than the Tigris due to wastewater discharge, its low depth and weaker currents.

Normally, it would gradually mix into the Tigris, but this time heavy rain created a stronger current in Diyala, sending a less-diluted polluted water into the Tigris, and "thus affecting downstream fisheries and potentially also water treatment plants".

As the situation worsened, authorities restricted water supply -- normally treated water from the Tigris -- in several areas of Wasit, reporting 20 documented cases of poisoning and rash.

Declining rain over recent years, coupled with rising temperatures, has brought water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to staggering lows, for which Baghdad also accuses upstream dams built by neighbouring Turkey and Iran.

- Black water -

Following the recent fish die-off, authorities vowed they would take the necessary measures to treat wastewater before discharge.

But decades of conflicts have left the country's infrastructure in a pitiful state and its water management systems in disrepair.

Iraq's new agency INA quoted a Baghdad official as saying that authorities will soon open seven more water treatment plants in the city.

In the town of al-Numaniyah, fish farmer Mazen Mansour, 51, gazed over the still water in his empty floating cages, which until recently held 38,000 fish he had been counting on selling next month.

Mansour said he did not realise polluted water had flooded the area until he saw his fish dying in the evening. He tried to save them by pumping air into his basins to provide oxygen, but it was too late.

"The water was black and filled with sewage," he said.

"All our work was gone in one night," added the father of four.

Now, he said, there is nothing he can do but wait and hope for compensation from the government.

"We urge the state to compensate us and hold those responsible accountable."

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Nikola Jokic's 25-point triple-double and 30 points from Jamal Murray propelled the Denver Nuggets to a 116-105 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves in their NBA playoff opener on Saturday.

Three-time NBA Most Valuable Player Jokic added 13 rebounds and 11 assists, shaking off a slow start that saw him score just six points in the first half to help the Nuggets pull away in a game tied 62-62 at halftime.

Murray scored 17 of his 30 in the first half to keep the Nuggets close, finishing a perfect 16 of 16 from the free-throw line.

The third playoff series in four seasons between the teams got off to a physical start at Denver's Ball Arena, with more than 40 fouls called, a flagrant foul called on Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels and a technical on Denver coach David Adelman.

The Nuggets trailed by as many as 12 in the first quarter before bearing down in the second period and pulling away after the break.

Adelman was pleased with the way his team responded after the early punch from the visitors.

"Winning a grimy game, it's good," Adelman said. "Both teams are experienced and used to winning these games. They know what it means to play in a physical match-up. There's a respect on both sides. There's also a want to win.  

Anthony Edwards led the Timberwolves with 22 points and Rudy Gobert added a double-double of 17 points and 10 rebounds, but ultimately they couldn't find an answer for Jokic.

"(Jokic) is such a patient player," Adelman said. "Early it was a lot of our guys making plays for each other and as they changed their coverages then he went to work."

The Nuggets, who beat Minnesota in the 2023 playoffs on the way to the NBA title, then lost to them the following year, host game two of the best-of-seven Western Conference series on Monday.

In the Eastern Conference, the third-seeded New York Knicks and fourth-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers opened with comfortable victories.

Jalen Brunson scored 28 points and Karl-Anthony Towns added 25 for the Knicks in a 113-102 victory over the Atlanta Hawks at Madison Square Garden.

Brunson scored 19 points in the first quarter to help the Knicks emerge from the back-and-forth period with a 30-24 lead they wouldn't relinquish.

Towns stepped it up in the second half, scoring 19 points in the second half to keep things rolling for a Knicks team aiming to improve on their trip to last year's Eastern Conference finals.

CJ McCollum scored 26 points to lead the Hawks.

In Cleveland, Donovan Mitchell scored 32 points to fuel the Cavaliers in a 126-113 win over the Toronto Raptors.

James Harden added a double-double of 22 points and 10 rebounds and Max Strus scored 24 points off the bench for the Cavs, who host game two. 

RJ Barrett scored 24 points for the Raptors, who never led after the opening minutes and trailed by as many as 24.

Mitchell has now scored at least 30 points in an NBA record nine straight playoff series openers.

"You see the focus," Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said of Mitchell. "How he just gets more locked-in than ever."

- Durant out for Rockets -

The final game of the day saw the West's fourth-seeded Los Angeles Lakers host the Houston Rockets.

The series was billed as a matchup of old foes LeBron James and Kevin Durant.

But Rockets star Durant was ruled out of game one with a bruised knee suffered in practice.

"Hopefully it's a one-game thing," coach Ime Udoka said.

James, 41 and playing in his unprecedented 23rd season, is in the playoffs for a record-equaling 19th time and chasing a fifth NBA title.

He's leading a Lakers team missing NBA leading scorer Luka Doncic and fellow guard Austin Reaves, who are sidelined indefinitely after late-season injuries.

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Voters in Bulgaria are heading to the polls in the eighth election in five years on Sunday with ex-president Rumen Radev's grouping expected to win on a pledge to fight corruption.

The European Union's poorest member has been mired in a political crisis since 2021 when large anti-corruption rallies toppled the conservative government of long-time leader Boyko Borissov.

Radev, a former airforce general who has advocated for renewing ties with Russia and slammed sending military aid to Ukraine, was president for nine years.

He stepped down earlier this year to lead newly formed centre-left grouping Progressive Bulgaria, with opinion polls before Sunday's vote suggesting the bloc could gain 35 percent of the vote.

Radev has said he wants to rid the country of its "oligarchic governance model" and backed anti-corruption protests in late 2025 that brought down the conservative-backed government.

"Radev's cause is for Bulgaria to have a future. We have reached a point where we are questioning the very future of our own country," Lazar Lazarov, a 28-year-old philosophy teacher, told AFP at Radev's final campaign rally in Sofia earlier this week.

"Radev has proven himself as president and as a statesman. He's the one who is most acceptable for the EU, the United States, Russia and, if you like, even for China."

Borissov's pro-European GERB party is likely to come second, according to opinion polls, with around 20 percent, ahead of the liberal PP-DB.

Polling stations will open at 0400 GMT and close at 1700 GMT.

- 'At ease!' -

Radev has slammed the EU's green energy policy, which he considers naive "in a world without rules", as well as any Bulgarian efforts to send arms to Ukraine battling a Russian invasion since 2022.

Pushing for renewed ties with Russia, Radev denounced a 10-year defence agreement between Sofia and Kyiv that was signed last month, which earned him fresh accusations from his opponents of being too soft on Moscow.

The ex-president also stoked dismay by screening images at his rally on Thursday of his meetings with world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin.

In a wave of outrage among pro-European voters on social media, hundreds of users shared a screenshot as proof that Radev sides with the Kremlin.

At the event itself, however, in Bulgaria's largest indoor arena, supporters received Radev with cheers, which he cut short with a military-style "at ease!" to laughter from the audience.

"We need to close ranks," he told some 10,000 supporters, presenting his party as non-corrupt "alternative to the perverse cartel of old-style parties".

Borissov, who headed the country virtually uninterrupted for close to a decade, has dismissed suggestions that Radev brings something "new".

At a rally of his party earlier this week, he insisted GERB had "fulfilled the dreams of the 1990s" with such achievements as the country joining the eurozone this year.

- High turnout expected -

Radev has vowed to avoid a coalition with GERB after the election and also ruled out cooperation with Delyan Peevski, heading the DPS party and sanctioned for corruption by the United States and Britain.

Instead, Radev said he was aiming at an absolute majority in the 240-seat parliament.

A lack of trust in politics has affected voter turnout, which slumped to 39 percent in the last election in 2024.

But with Radev rallying voters, high turnout is expected, according to analyst Boryana Dimitrova from the Alpha Research polling institute.

Political parties have called on Bulgarians to show up for the polls, also to curb the impact of vote buying.

In recent weeks, police have seized more than one million euros in raids against vote buying in stepped-up operations.

They have also detained hundreds of people, including local councillors and mayors.

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Marissa McCann delivered when Missouri needed her most Saturday, holding South Carolina scoreless in a 5-0 victory at Mizzou Softball Stadium. The win evens the series as the Tigers look to avoid their first series loss to the Gamecocks since 2018.

A day after Jori Heard held Mizzou to just five hits, McCann held South Carolina to four hits while striking out six in her first career Southeastern Conference shutout.

“We literally threw every pitch that she has in her repertoire,” coach Larissa Anderson said after the game. “She commanded every pitch she has, which becomes extremely effective in what she’s able to do and keeping hitters off balance.”

Behind her, Missouri’s defense continued to shine, with multiple defensive stops to limit the Gamecocks offense. In the bottom of the second, with a runner threatening at third base, Claire Cahalan made a strong throw from left field to get the runner at home.

Later in the same inning, Sidney Forrester made a diving catch in right field to erase a hit and end the inning. The Tigers defense has been elite all season and currently leads the nation in fielding percentage at .987.

“They work so hard and I’m just so happy that they got to showcase some of their skills and bring some sense of relief to me,” McCann said after the game. “Knowing I can pitch free and my defense always has my back no matter what.”

On offense, Missouri got its first run in the third after Stefania Abruscato hit a sacrifice fly to right field to give the Tigers an early 1-0 lead.

One inning later, with runners on second and third, freshman Gracie Britton drove in a run with a single before a throwing error scored another, allowing Britton to advance to third. Cahalan entered as a pinch runner and came around to score on a wild pitch. Abruscato capped the inning with an RBI single to left field to give the Tigers a 5-0 lead.

“Everything as a whole today, what we did out on defense, the circle and the box just built a lot of momentum for us,” McCann said. “I think we feel pretty confident going into tomorrow”

A series win against the Gamecocks would serve the Tigers well as they face a brutal final stretch of the season against some of the best teams in the nation, including No. 6 Arkansas and No. 9 Tennessee.

With the win Saturday, Missouri is back above .500 and improves its record to 24-23. The Tigers will need to keep it that way as .500 is a threshold required to make the postseason.

The series finale is Sunday at 1 p.m. and will be streamed on SEC Network+.