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The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”

“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.

“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)

But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.

Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman whose now ex-husband is on trial for drugging and raping her, and inviting dozens of other men to rape her, has taken the stand in court for the first time.

Gisèle told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that "it's not for us to have shame - it's for them".

"I want all women who have been raped to say: Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. I don't want them to be ashamed any longer," she said, referring to her request for an open trial and for the videos of the alleged rapes to be shown.

In the year and a half following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion, hundreds more infants died than expected in the United States, new research shows. The vast majority of those infants had congenital anomalies, or birth defects.

Earlier research – spurred by a CNN investigative report - found that infant mortality spiked in Texas after a 6-week abortion ban took effect in 2021, and experts say the new data suggests that the impacts of the bans and restrictions enacted by some states post-Dobbs have been large enough to affect broader trends.

“This is evidence of a national ripple effect, regardless of state-level status,” said Dr. Parvati Singh, an assistant professor of epidemiology with The Ohio State University College of Public Health and lead author of the new study.

A 24-year-old man who assaulted a female convenience store clerk in the southeastern city of Jinju last year, calling her a "feminist" due to her short hair, has been sentenced to three years in prison in his appeal trial.

The court recognized the attack as a "misogynistic crime," marking the first time in South Korea that misogyny was acknowledged as a motive in a criminal ruling. The victim, who lost her hearing due to the attack, expressed relief at the "meaningful ruling."

The Changwon District Court's criminal division upheld Wednesday the original three-year sentence for the attacker, 24, citing "groundless hatred toward women" as the motive behind the crime.

The incident occurred in April last year, when the 24-year-old assaulted a female part-time worker at a convenience store in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province, because of her short hairstyle, calling her a "feminist."

Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.

The potentially fake door-knocks – when canvassers falsely claim to have visited a home – could present a serious setback for Trump as he and Kamala Harris remain even in the polls with fewer than 20 days until an election.

The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Elon Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under “unusual survey logs” by the Campaign Sidekick canvassing app.

Oxfam condemns in the strongest terms the killing in Gaza today of four water engineers and workers from the Khuzaa municipality who were working with our strategic partner the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU).  

The four men were killed on their way to conduct repairs to water infrastructure in Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis. Despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities their clearly-marked vehicle was bombed. Oxfam stands in solidarity with the CMWU, their partners and the families of the victims.  

Their deaths deepen the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza where access to clean water is already severely compromised.  

Dozens of engineers, civil servants and humanitarian workers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes throughout this war. They were all working on essential services to keep Gaza's fragile infrastructure running. Despite their movements being coordinated with the Israeli authorities by the CMWU and the Palestinian Water Authority, to ensure their safety, they were still targeted.

A three-judge panel on Thursday ruled that Tennessee doctors who provide emergency abortions to protect the life of the mother cannot have their medical licenses revoked or face other disciplinary actions while a lawsuit challenging the state’s sweeping abortion ban continues. 

The ruling also outlined specific pregnancy-related conditions that would now qualify as “medical necessity exceptions” under the ban, which currently does not include exceptions for fetal anomalies or for victims of rape or incest.

“This lack of clarity is evidenced by the confusion and lack of consensus within the Tennessee medical community on the circumstances requiring necessary health- and life-saving abortion care,” the ruling stated. “The evidence presented underscores how serious, difficult, and complex these issues are and raises significant questions as to whether the medical necessity exception is sufficiently narrow to serve a compelling state interest.”

An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.” 

Meanwhile, a related PAC also funded by Musk is microtargeting likely Black voters on Snapchat with ads that says Kamala Harris is trying to ban menthol cigarettes (surveys have shown that 81 percent of Black smokers use menthols, and big tobacco has disproportionately marketed menthol cigarettes to Black Americans). 

The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.

In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.

Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”

Some 18 North Korean soldiers are believed to have deserted the Russian frontline, with Kremlin fighters reportedly searching for them.

The troops were deployed in Russia's Kursk and Bryansk oblasts, about four miles from the border with Ukraine, when they deserted, the public broadcasting company of Ukraine, Suspilne, reported.

Intelligence officials cited by the broadcaster said the Russian military is searching for the North Korean soldiers, while commanders are trying to conceal the desertion from their higher-ups.

After a difficult year that’s seen multiple games fall short of sales expectations, original Life Is Strange developer Don’t Nod is implementing a “reorganization project” that could impact up to 69 jobs – or, as the French union that represents Don’t Nod workers points out, 29 percent of Don’t Nod’s Paris workforce. In light of this, the union, STJV, has denounced company leadership and called for workers to mobilize and defend their jobs.

Don’t Nod has previously said that its latest releases, *Jusant *and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, fell short of “commercial expectations,” leading it to “temporarily” pause two other in-development projects. Despite a focus on the upcoming and thus far well-received Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, Don’t Nod now says that “amid deteriorating results” it has been “compelled to consider a reorganization project to safeguard its competitiveness in an increasingly demanding and competitive ecosystem.”  

STJV, which earlier this year published a post criticizing Don’t Nod for a burnout-inducing work environment in which "each project erratically follows another," has deemed the layoff plan “the climax of a series of catastrophic decisions, denounced for a long time by workers' representatives.”  

“Management is hiding being 'the state of the economy' and 'a very competitive market' as excuses for its failures, without ever questioning its inconsistent decisions, which have been harmful to the studio and its workers,” wrote Don’t Nod’s STJV union section in a post published today.

Yesterday, Twitch suspended an account that belonged to streamer and famous YouTuber Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt after he made racist comments about the death of Palestinians in Gaza. Now, the YouTuber has responded to the temporary ban with a surprisingly clear-eyed assessment of the controversy and what led up to it.

“I don’t really want to mince words or, ‘oh I wasn’t justifying or promoting [the genocide],’” He said during a new 20-minute long video on the subject. “I said something about it that was disgusting.”