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The Guardian

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French former senator found guilty of drugging MP with intent to sexually assault her

Joël Guerriau sentenced to four years in prison after spiking lawmaker’s champagne with ecstasy

A French court has found a former senator guilty of drugging a female lawmaker with ecstasy with intent to sexually assault her.

Joël Guerriau, 68, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, of which 18 months must be behind bars.

In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

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Two-year-old pots two Guinness World Records with snooker trick shots

Manchester toddler Jude Owens becomes youngest person to perform bank shot and double pot just weeks apart

A two-year-old has become the holder of two Guinness World Records by becoming the youngest person to perform a pair of trick shots in snooker.

Manchester toddler Jude Owens successfully performed a pool bank shot at two years and 302 days old on 12 October last year.

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Seven out of 10 UK mothers feel overloaded, research reveals

Study also says almost half have a mental health issue such as anxiety or depression

Seven out of 10 mothers in the UK feel overloaded and almost half have a mental health issue such as anxiety or depression, new research has revealed.

The survey of mothers’ experiences in 12 European countries also found that most of those in Britain still do the majority of household tasks and caregiving work alone, and that the UK was among the worst for motherhood disadvantaging a woman’s career.

71% of UK mothers feel overloaded – 4% more than the 67% European average

47% of UK mothers suffer from mental health issues, including burnout, compared with 50% in Europe as a whole

31% of UK respondents felt motherhood had a negative effect on their career, higher than the 27% average, with Ireland the highest on 36%

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Minnesota raids continue as DHS report indicates two agents fired guns at Alex Pretti

Report emerges as Trump signals he may reduce the surge of ICE and other federal agents in the state

As federal immigration crackdowns in Minnesota continued on Tuesday, an initial report to Congress from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) obtained by various news outlets indicates that two officers fired their guns at Alex Pretti during his fatal shooting.

The report emerged as Donald Trump signals he may begin reducing the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in the state.

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Gelatinous horde of red stinging jellyfish washes into Melbourne beaches

A ‘massive smack’ of lion’s mane jellyfish has appeared across Port Phillip Bay, but experts say fears of a ‘jellygeddon’ are overblown

Swimmers have been advised to steer clear if they see red jellies in the water after a gelatinous horde descended on Melbourne beaches.

Thousands of lion’s mane jellyfish have washed into the shallows and on to the sand across Port Phillip Bay, from Altona in the west to Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula.

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Keir Starmer walks tightrope over myriad issues in quest to bolster China ties

Vow to bring ‘stability and clarity’ to the UK’s approach to Beijing on first visit by a British prime minister in eight years will be sorely tested

Keir Starmer has travelled to China with a vow to bring “stability and clarity” to the UK’s approach to Beijing after years of what he described as “inconsistency” under the Tories, but a series of issues may get in the way of his efforts to improve relations with the economic powerhouse.

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Regenponcho

In een enorme mall in Paramaribo spreekt de Chinese verkoopster geen Nederlands of Engels. Op de paklijst voor een excursie naar het binnenland staat een regenponcho, geen…

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them 'Reinvent Themselves'

Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers "reinvent themselves" before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living.

The $205 billion bank sent out an internal memo last year requiring staffers to learn prompting skills specifically. Fraser told the Washington Post at Davos that AI "will change the nature of what people do every day" and "will take some jobs away." The adaptive training platform lets experts complete the course in under 10 minutes while beginners need about 30 minutes. Citi reported last year that employees had entered more than 6.5 million prompts into its built-in AI tools, and Q4 2025 data shows a 70% adoption rate for the bank's proprietary AI tools.

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Internal Messages May Doom Meta At Social Media Addiction Trial

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit -- considered a "bellwether" case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints -- goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality. TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported. For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She's fighting to claim untold damages -- including potentially punitive damages -- to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks. [...]

To win, K.G.M.'s lawyers will need to "parcel out" how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.'s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward. However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.'s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight. "She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence," Bergman said.

The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.'s case and others.' However, social media companies' internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.'s case that supposedly provide "smoking-gun evidence" that platforms "purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing" -- while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models. Most of the unsealed documents came from Meta. An internal email shows Mark Zuckerberg decided Meta's top strategic priority was getting teens "locked in" to Meta's family of apps. Another damning document discusses allowing "tweens" to use a private mode inspired by fake Instagram accounts ("finstas"). The same document includes an admission that internal data showed Facebook use correlated with lower well-being.

Internal communications showed Meta seemingly bragging that "teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to" and an employee declaring, "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," likening all social media platforms to "pushers."

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