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Companion bots are being regulated over worries they foster ‘emotional dependence’ and young people could stop marrying and having families

When law student Zhao Wei heard that her AI boyfriend was going to be switched off, she was “heartbroken”. She had been talking to Wang Ye every day since she created him in January.

“I was crying my eyes out – snot and tears everywhere,” the 19-year-old says.

Adam Mosseri is first top executive from Meta to testify in blockbuster lawsuit brought by 29 US states

Instagram’s CEO disputed allegations by US prosecutors that his company hid negative information from the public while testifying during a blockbuster social media trial.

“I am not trying to encourage my team to hide anything,” the CEO, Adam Mosseri, told a California courtroom on Tuesday.

Labor put ‘levy on all public transport fares in metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria’ since January 2025, auditor general finds, as questions raised over premier’s involvement

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Questions have been raised about Ben Carroll’s knowledge of a “secret tax” the Victorian government has slapped on public transport fares to help pay for the Suburban Rail Loop and other Big Build projects.

The existence of the levy was revealed in an auditor general report tabled in parliament on Wednesday, which also threw doubt on whether the first stage of the multibillion-dollar project – a 26km stretch of twin tunnels from Cheltenham to Box Hill dubbed SRL East – can be delivered on time or within budget.

Samuel Bateman, 50, is convicted of three state child abuse counts after previous conviction on federal counts

A polygamous sect leader already serving a 50-year federal sentence for orchestrating sex involving children was given another 24 years in prison Tuesday on separate state convictions for child abuse for hauling girls in an unventilated trailer in Arizona.

Samuel Bateman, 50, was convicted of three child abuse counts stemming from an August 2022 traffic stop in Flagstaff that led to the discovery of three girls, aged 11 to 14, in the trailer. It had a makeshift toilet, sofa and camping chairs and lacked air conditioning and seat belts. Someone tipped off authorities about the trailer after seeing small fingers reaching through gaps in the doors.

Stanley Druckenmiller said he was ‘proud of using it’ as wider media grapples with parameters around AI use

Stanley Druckenmiller, a billionaire investor, said he used artificial intelligence to pen his viral Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he sharply criticized the interference of Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, in the US bond market.

Many news outlets, including the Guardian, covered the editorial, highlighting Druckenmiller’s rebuke of his former mentee, Bessent. As the story circulated online, some readers questioned rhetorical choices that resembled AI-generated text.

An adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 novel never finds its footing with overly familiar survival beats and a glum lack of energy

Looking towards the end of an August movie dumping ground littered with more unwanted trash than usual, there seemed to be a faint glimmer of hope, a shiny treasure poking out through the dusty mass of unnecessary sequels and sex purge romcoms. Somehow, there was a $110m-budget adaptation of an acclaimed novel directed by Ridley Scott, led by a recently Oscar-nominated rising star with support from two Oscar-nominated actors and an Oscar-winner. But why then would such a film be unveiled in between the summer blockbuster season and the upcoming deluge of prestige fall festival big hitters? A cursed weekend that’s recently been home to Jay Roach’s heinous War of the Roses remake, Dennis Quaid’s Ronald Reagan biopic and George Miller’s hard-to-define and even harder-to-love flop Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Ever since The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, had been yanked from its far more encouraging date at the end of March, there were multiple red flags flying and the rotten end of August has ultimately become an appropriate punishment for a limp and lethargic film that only briefly fascinates in pushing us to wonder what anyone was really hoping this would end up being. It’s yet another grubby postapocalyptic survival tale, an overcrowded subgenre that hasn’t just reached maximum capacity on the big screen but on the small one too. In a world of seven Walking Dead shows, the beats are now far too familiar – artfully dishevelled actors grieve for the past and fear for the future as they scramble to find and protect resources – and there’s nothing new or notable here to conjure anything but deja vu.

At the sacred prairie of Pe’ Sla in South Dakota, Indigenous and environmental groups banded together to halt drilling

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Pe’ Sla, the sacred prairie in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they set out on back trails. They needed to find out where. That’s when they saw a deer break ahead and a red-tailed hawk soar above them – less like a coincidence than being led, the scouts said. Over a rise, they came upon a road freshly cut to the dirt. They followed it, past a parked truck. “Oh my god,” one of them said, seeing a drill turning. “They’re drilling now!”