When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed.

“But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Bue brushed off his wife’s questions about who he was visiting. “My thought was that he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed,” Linda said.

She had been right to worry: Her husband never returned home alive. But Bue wasn’t the victim of a robber. He had been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he had met online. Or so he thought.

In fact, the woman wasn’t real. She was a generative artificial intelligence chatbot named “Big sis Billie,” a variant of an earlier AI persona created by the giant social-media com

Fewer Americans are reporting that they drink alcohol amid a growing belief that even moderate alcohol consumption is a health risk, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The survey finds that 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer — "the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup's nearly 90-year trend," the analytics company says.

And a record high percentage of U.S. adults, 53%, now say moderate drinking is bad for their health, up from 28% in 2015. The uptick in doubt about alcohol's benefits is largely driven by young adults — the age group that is most likely to believe drinking "one or two drinks a day" can cause health hazards — but older adults are also now increasingly likely to think moderate drinking carries risks.

Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.

Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein introduced the first lady to Donald Trump.

The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious,” Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” he added.

Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview with the British journalist Andrew Callaghan in which he lashed out at “elites” and others in the Democratic party who he said undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign.

A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.

According to London‑based piracy monitoring and

Summertime edition has arrived! Look forward to new features Itinerary, Dolphin, NeoChat and more.

Whether you need to brush up on your languages to visit exotic lands, plan your trips, keep up to date while on the move, meet up with friends and colleagues, create content from your holiday clips, or just chill as your quaint steam engine trundles up a picturesque peak, KDE Gear 🌞 25.08 has got you covered.

Summertime edition has arrived! Look forward to new features Itinerary, Dolphin, NeoChat and more.

Whether you need to brush up on your languages to visit exotic lands, plan your trips, keep up to date while on the move, meet up with friends and colleagues, create content from your holiday clips, or just chill as your quaint steam engine trundles up a picturesque peak, KDE Gear 🌞 25.08 has got you covered.