A group of Chinese scientists claims to have created the world’s first ‘AI child’, an entity displaying behavior and capabilities similar to those of a three- or four-year-old human child.

Named Tong Tong or ‘Little Girl’, the world’s first AI child is considered a massive step in the direction of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Unveiled at the Frontiers of General Artificial Intelligence Technology Exhibition, the innovative AI model is reportedly capable of autonomous learning and may display a level of emotional engagement that has not been seen in AI development until now. According to her creators at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), Tong Tong continually improves her skills and knowledge through interaction with humans and exploration.

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A 71-year-old Florida woman is accused of assaulting and trying to kill her husband of 52 years over a postcard he received from a woman in Turkey that he had dated six decades ago.

They say we get wiser and more understanding as we get older, but apparently, jealousy never gets old. 71-year-old Bertha Yalter of North Miami Beach is facing charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery on a person 65 and older after allegedly attacking her husband in a feat of rage. According to the arrest report, Yalter tried to smother her elderly husband with a pillow after learning that he had received a postcard from a woman in Turkey whom he had dated around 60 years ago. The attack occurred at the couple’s condominium in the Eastern Shores area of North Miami Beach and left the visibly frail man with bruises and open lacerations on both of his arms and stomach area, as well as bleeding bite marks.

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A Russian man vacationing in Pattaya, Thailand has been caught on camera shaving a local barber’s head in revenge for the disatisfactory haircut he had received.

The shocking footage that has been doing the rounds online for over a week shows a Caucasian man getting a haircut at the Salute Barbershop in Pattaya. According to eye witnesses, he walked into the venue and explained to one of the barbers there how he wanted his hair cut using hand gestures because he allegedly didn’t speak very good English. At one point, the man, who was later identified as a Russian tourist, looked into the mirror and flew into a feat of rage over the botched haircut. He started slamming his fists on the table and swearing at the barber, before picking up the shears and shaving part of his fringe as revenge.

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A 23-year-old Russian man recently revealed that he trained and used ChatGPT to filter through 5,239 girls’ dating profiles and then date the best matches until he found his soon-to-be wife.

Alexander Zhadan first made waves on RuNet – the online Russian-speaking community – a year ago, when he tweeted that he wrote an academic thesis using ChatGPT in just 23 hours. A few days ago, the young Russian IT professional once again made news headlines, this time for using the same AI tool to filter through thousands of online dating profiles and relying on its tips and advice to find the perfect partner and then make her his wife. Zhadan’s story, originally told through a series of posts on X/Twitter, has sparked a heated debate on the morality of using AI tools to find love online, and while the 23-year-old admits that his story could change how others see online dating, he did point out that ChatGPT has its limitations and that he needed to get involved personally to connect with his dates.

It all started with Alexander’s disappointing experience with popular dating apps like Tinder. He would swipe left, then right, then spark a conversation with a potential match and then that person would just disappear. It was a huge waste of time, but having become familiar with ChatGPT, he wondered if there was a way to use the AI tool to make his online dating experience more efficient.

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A Hong Kong finance worker at a multinational company was tricked into transferring $25 million to scammers after attending a video conference with deepfake CFO and several colleagues.

Hong Kong police recently reported that it is investigating an elaborate scam that saw a group of bad actors defraud a multinational firm of $200 million Hong Kong dollars ($25.6 million) using deepfake technology to impersonate company management during a video call. Fraudsters initially targeted one of the unnamed company’s finance workers with an email from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer (CFO). Seeing that the message involved a ‘secret transaction’ to the tune of $200 million Hong Kong dollars, the man suspected it was a phishing email, but those doubts were put to rest when he was invited to a video conference with the CFO and several other colleagues he recognized.

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Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science recently fired the director of the prestigious Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences allegedly for controversial remarks that are incompatible with science.

Geneticist Alexander Kudryavtsev was named director of the General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in June of 2021 and was scheduled to carry out his mandate until 2027, but last month, Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science announced that Kudryavtsev had been relieved of his duties and replaced. His sacking was immediately linked to a series of controversial statements made in March of last year, during the 3rd International Scientific and Theological Conference “God – Man – World”. The Russian scientist claimed that before the biblical flood, humans used to live for up to 900 years, but that their lifespan has shortened since then due to “original, ancestral and personal sin.”

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A stretch of beach in Hakodate City, Japan’s Hokkaido Prefecture, has been dubbed ‘Fishbone Beach’ after being covered by a thick layer of brittle fish bones.

In December of last year, thousands of tons of dead fish were washed ashore in Hokkaido, in an event that many linked to the release of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean. But that was 600 miles away, and several experts labeled the theory as completely false. About 80 percent of the dead fish were sardines and the rest were other species of small fish, like mackerel. They covered a stretch of 1.5 km along the coast of Hakodate, and the local government dealt with the fish washed ashore via incineration, leaving the ones in the water to naturally decompose. What they didn’t expect was for the fish bones to turn the beach into a veritable fish graveyard.

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A 23-year-old Chinese man recently lost his life as a result of a double tooth extraction that sadly caused intracranial bleeding.

In this day and age, tooth extraction is considered a fairly routine procedure that poses minimal risk to the patient’s life. But a recent story from China shows that ”minimal’ is not synonymous with “zero”. A 23-year-old man named Wang, from Hunan Province in mainland China, went to Kuiyong People’s Hospital in Shenzhen to have his tooth pain treated. After examining his teeth, the dentist there decided that he needed two of them extracted, which Wang agreed to. Following the procedure, the boy was asked to get some dental X-rays, but as he got up from the chair, he suddenly lost consciousness and fell to the ground.

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A 48-year-old English man vacationing in Pattaya, Thailand, ran out of money and tried extorting more from his family back home by having his mates pose as his kidnappers.

Time and money fly when you’re having fun, and Ian Robbie Day, a 48-year-old man from Portsmouth, England, was having the time of his life in Thailand’s party capital of Pattaya. After repeatedly prolonging his exotic vacation and asking his family back home to send him more money, Ian found himself with no more money to burn on booze, drugs, and other local pleasures. His family refused to fund his non-stop partying anymore, so he was forced to make a decision – either end his Thai vacation and return home, or find a way to get his hands on more money. It was a no-brainer, so he convinced his mates to beat him up and pose as masked gangsters, so he could fake his kidnapping and ask his family for ransom money…

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The owner of a trucking company in China landed in hot water with law enforcement after she admitted to installing GPS tracking devices on police cars in her area to help her trucks avoid them.

A woman in Xiangyang, Hubei province can consider herself lucky to have been slapped with eight days of administrative detention and a 500 yuan ($70) fine for a very serious crime – tracking the movements of police cars with the help of hidden GPS devices. Her scheme was accidentally discovered during a routine checkup when the traffic law enforcement brigade in Xiangyang found a mysterious black box attached to the chassis of one of their patrol cars. Further inspection revealed that the box contained a GPS tracker, which was subsequently found on six of the brigade’s 11 vehicles. By following the trail of the SIM cards associated with the tracking devices, authorities were able to find the culprit, a local woman named Zhu who admitted to tracking the movements of the police cars.

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A Turkish woman recently filed a lawsuit against her husband, claiming that he rarely showered, smelled of sweat, and brushed his teeth only once or twice per week.

The woman, identified only as A.Y. by Turkish news media, filed for divorce from her husband, C.Y., citing his lack of personal hygiene as the main reason. The plaintiff’s lawyer told the 19th Family Court in Ankara that the defendant wore the same clothes for at least 5 days in a row, rarely showered, and constantly reeked of sweat. Witnesses were brought in to confirm these claims, including mutual acquaintances and even some of the husband’s co-workers. They all gave statements confirming the defendant’s poor personal hygiene. The court approved the woman’s request for a divorce and also ordered the husband to pay her 500,000 Turkish lira ($16,500) as compensation to his now-former spouse for putting up with his lack of personal hygiene.

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A chilling video showing the apparent conviction of two 16-year-old North Korean boys to 12 years of hard labor for watching South Korean soap operas recently went viral online.

In a video obtained by the BBC, two young boys in grey uniforms can be seen on a stage surrounded by hundreds of people as they receive their sentence for the “horrible” crime of watching and distributing K-dramas from the “puppet” South Korean regime. All manner of South Korean entertainment, including television programs, is forbidden in South Korea, and according to a law enacted by the Hermit Kingdom in 2020, watching or distributing South Korean entertainment is punishable by serious prison time or even death. But some people are still willing to risk their lives for a glimpse into the neighboring country.

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A 58-year-old man has become the bane of restauranteurs in the Dutch city of Delft after eating without paying at least 127 times in the last few years.

Earlier this month, police in Delft were called at a restaurant where a man was allegedly trying to skip out on the bill by faking a medical condition. According to Mike Hogeveen, the bartender at the unnamed restaurant, the man caught his attention when he started buying people rounds and offering to share his food with everyone, but he really became the center of attention when he started shaking his left arm uncontrollably as if he was having a stroke. Paramedics were summoned, but upon examining the man, they realized that he was faking and refused to take him to the hospital as he had requested.

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A Chinese marathon runner famous for chain-smoking during official running competitions has been banned by the athletic federation for two years for his “uncivilized” behavior.

Chen Mouxian, aka ‘Uncle Chen’, first made international headlines in 2022, when photos of him running in the Xin’anjiang Marathon went viral on social media. What drew people’s attention to the then-50-year-old experienced runner was that he always had a lit cigarette in his mouth, and kept lighting up as soon as he finished a cigarette. Dubbed “Smoking Brother”, Chen sparked controversy on Chinese social media, with some users praising his athletic abilities, and others criticizing him for promoting an unhealthy habit and also exposing other runners to harmful tobacco smoke. This month, Uncle Chen was banned from participating in marathons for two years after once again smoking his way through the 2024 Xiamen Marathon in Fujian on January 7th.

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An elderly Chinese woman has decided to leave her 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) fortune to her pet cats and dogs, claiming that they were always there for her, unlike her three children.

The woman, made her first will some years back, splitting all her possessions among her three children, but she recently had a change of heart after being neglected by her human offspring. She claims that her children never visited or at least arranged for her to be taken care of when she was ill, and they hardly ever contact her, so she has decided to leave all her assets to the only creatures that have always been by her side – her pet cats and dogs. The Shanghai-based woman has already changed her will to reflect her wishes that all her money be used to care for her pets and their offspring after her passing.

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