Dominique Pelicot, who has been jailed for 20 years for drugging his then wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and inviting men to rape her, faces a further investigation for the rape and murder of an estate agent in Paris in 1991, and an attempted rape in 1999, amid questions over whether he could have been a serial offender for decades.

Investigators in Nanterre outside Paris have reopened two cold cases and placed Pelicot under formal investigation, as police consider potential links to other cases involving young estate agents. Pelicot could face another trial at a later date.

Elon Musk is backing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), triggering an outcry in Berlin in the run-up to a critical snap election.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” the billionaire X owner wrote on the platform on Friday in the latest of a series of endorsements of European far-right parties.

Musk has recently supported European populist-right politicians in increasingly clear terms, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloniand Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Earlier this week, Farage boasted that Musk is “right behind” him — and raised the prospect that the tech tycoon would financially back his Reform UK party.

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.

NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department's Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state's largest agency.

The local hamburger franchise Lotteria was the butt of a surge of memes and other online satire on Thursday, after police investigations revealed that former intelligence commanders met at one of its restaurants in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, to discuss martial law plans, two days before President Yoon Suk Yeol's declaration on Dec. 3.

"Martial law plotting at Lotteria — that's the most ridiculous combination of words that I've seen in my life," an online user wrote on the social platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

Another wrote, "Here is a Korean history quiz for students later on: Where did intelligence commanders hold a meeting to plot for martial law? A. Presidential office, B. Underground bunker, C. Lotteria," and "Shake those flavored French fries like you want to shake up the nation."

By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight.  Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.

Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbo

A court on Thursday convicted of aggravated rape a French man for orchestrating the mass rapes of his now former wife Gisele Pelicot by dozens of strangers who he recruited online.

Dominique Pelicot, who had already confessed to the crimes, was found guilty by the court in the southern city of Avignon after an over three month trial that shocked France and turned his former wife Gisele Pelicot into a feminist hero. He faces the maximum term of 20 years in jail when the judge later announces sentencing.

The gig economy’s labor model and its algorithmic management technologies now have a foothold in one of the largest labor sectors in the country: health care. On-demand nursing companies such as CareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed have promised hospitals more control and nurses more flexibility. Through original interviews with 29 “gig” nurses and nursing assistants, this brief finds that these apps encourage nurses to work for less pay, fail to provide certainty about scheduling and the amount or nature of work, take little to no accountability for worker safety, and can threaten patient well-being by placing nurses in unfamiliar clinical environments with no onboarding or facility training. On-demand nursing platforms are also using the Uber playbook to lobby state legislatures in an attempt to exempt themselves from existing labor regulations. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses have fled the profession as a result of poor working conditions, creating what som

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.

GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.

“My first project at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe conference] as CEO, we announced free Code

Less than two weeks after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on the streets of midtown Manhattan, his alleged assassin Luigi Mangione has been greeted not by universal condemnation for the brazen violence -- but rather, a surge of enthusiastic support online for his so-called vigilante justice.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit focused on cybersecurity that partners with government and law enforcement, released a new threat assessment bulletin warning that online support for the alleged shooter risks encouraging copycat attacks.

"Overwhelming bipartisan support for the attack" across social media "has resulted in several narratives encouraging similar violent activities directed at other healthcare executive teams," CIS analysts said.

"The narratives supporting Mangione's targeted attack likely serve to encourage like-minded individuals, particularly as Mangione continues to be viewed by the public as an 'American hero' and sympathetic figure," CIS

British mobile phone company O2 has unveiled a new creation, Daisy, a chit-chat and kitty-cat loving artificial intelligence "granny" who talks to scammers to keep them away from real people.

"Hello, scammers. I'm your worst nightmare," Daisy says by way of introduction to would-be ne'er-do-wells.

In the video introduction, featuring former Love Island contestant and scam victim Amy Hart, scammers are heard feeling much of the same frustrations they put their victims through as Daisy breezily yammers on about her kitten, Fluffy, and her inability to follow the scammers' instructions.

For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.

This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?

The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.

Texas has sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, launching one of the first challenges in the U.S. to shield laws that Democrat-controlled states passed to protect physicians after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit on Thursday in Collin County, and it was announced Friday.

Such prescriptions, made online and over the phone, are a key reason that the number of abortions has increased across the U.S. even since state bans started taking effect. Most abortions in the U.S. involve pills rather than procedures.

Last month, a detective in a small town outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, invited dozens of high school girls and their parents to the police station to undertake a difficult task: one by one, the girls were asked to confirm that they were depicted in hundreds of AI-generated deepfake pornographic images seized by law enforcement.

In a series of back-to-back private meetings, Detective Laurel Bair of the Susquehanna Regional Police Department slid each image out from under the folder’s cover, so only the girl’s face was shown, unless the families specifically requested to see the entire uncensored image.

“It made me a lot more upset after I saw the pictures because it made them so much more real for me,” one Lancaster victim, now 16, told Forbes. “They’re very graphic and they’re very realistic,” the mother said. “There’s no way someone who didn’t know her wouldn't think: ‘that’s her naked,’ and that’s the scary part.” There were more than 30 images of her daughter.

The photos w

Proposals for a new law which could see the bosses of major polluters jailed for up to 20 years has received enough support from MSPs to be introduced at Holyrood next year.

Monica Lennon's proposed Ecocide Prevention Bill has the backing of enough cross-party members to be brought forward and the Scottish government has indicated that it will not intervene to stop it.

This would clear the way for the bill to be formally introduced in the Scottish Parliament next year.

Scotland would be the first part of the UK to have such a law which could impose harsh penalties on executives responsible for major environmental damage.

Women in Iran could face the death sentence or up to 15 years in prison if they defy new compulsory morality laws due to come into effect this week.

New laws promoting the “culture of chastity and hijab” passed by the Iranian authorities earlier this month impose severe penalties for those caught “promoting nudity, indecency, unveiling or improper dressing”, including fines of up to £12,500, flogging and prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years for repeat offenders.

Article 37 of the new law also stipulates that those promoting or propagating indecency, unveiling or “bad dressing” to foreign entities, including international media and civil society organisations, could face a decade in prison and up to £12,500 in fines.

A rescue operation is underway to save a five-year-old boy who fell into a 150ft borewell in western India three days ago.

Aryan Meena was playing in a field when he fell down the narrow borewell in Dausa city in Rajasthan state at around 3.15pm on Monday, his father Jagdish Meena told reporters.

A city official said the boy appeared to be lying unconscious and rescue workers had pushed down a pipe to supply oxygen.

House Republicans have tucked a provision into a must-pass defense bill that would strip health care from military families’ transgender kids, putting parents in a position of having to choose between their careers in the military and providing medically necessary health care for their loved ones.

The language slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House is voting on later this week, is buried on page 399 of the 1,813-page bill. Republicans added it at the last minute, after Democrats had worked with them to help craft the legislation.

It’s just one sentence: “Medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18.”

The ruling People Power Party (PPP), which adopted a unified stance of opposing the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol, is showing signs of division. Rep. Bae Hyun-jin, who abstained from last week's first impeachment vote, has announced plans to participate in the upcoming vote.

Bae posted a brief statement on Tuesday on her social media, saying, "I will participate in this week's vote." However, she did not clarify whether she would vote in favor of the motion.

Bae is the first PPP member, aside from lawmakers Ahn Cheol-soo, Kim Yea-ji and Kim Sang-wook — who participated in last week's vote — to publicly declare her intention to vote.

AI company Embodied announced this week that they would be shutting down following financial difficulties and a sudden withdrawal of funding. Embodied’s main product was Moxie, an AI-powered social robot specifically made with autistic children in mind. The robot itself cost $799.00 and now, following the closure of Embodied, it will cease to function.

Moxie is a small blue robot with a big expressive face straight out of a Pixar movie. The robot used large language models in the cloud to answer questions, talk, and function. With Embodied out of business, the robot will soon no longer be able to make those calls. This outcome was always likely – any cloud based device is subject to the health of the company and LLMs are not cheap to run. This has actually happened before [with a company called

A US woman who flew to Australia with a gold-plated pistol in her luggage has been sentenced to a year in jail, despite claiming she brought it with her for protection.

Liliana Goodson pleaded guilty to charges of illegally importing an unauthorised firearm and illegally importing ammunition.

On Monday, the 30-year-old was sentenced in Sydney’s Downing Centre local court to the 12-month jail term, of which four months will be served in full-time custody.