Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud

Excerpt: Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes.

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says the quiet part out loud

Excerpt: Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now. And how exactly would his technology only hurt Democrat women?

Palantir’s lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff

Excerpt: Like other US government agencies, the Department (USDA) has ordered government employees back to the office. According to a contract notice, the return-to-work mandate has created the need for “advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data”

In a statement to The Register, the USDA ignored our questions about cost and rationale and stated: “This is not a new tool. This tool was deployed last year to support USE IT (building utilization and reporting) and workspace allocation and management.”

The contract notice, signed by USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares, acknowledges that other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but that only Palantir can do the job right.

Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice

Excerpt: The company had said its launch of “What People Suggest”, which provided tips from strangers, showed “the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe”. But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision.

A Google spokesperson confirmed “What People Suggest” had been scrapped. The move came as part of a “broader simplification” of its search page and had nothing to do with the quality or safety of the new feature, the spokesperson said.

‘Its real goal was to maximize reward’ — Anthropic paper reveals AI was hiding dangerous intent 70% of the time

Excerpt: A research paper published by Anthropic has revealed that one of its experimental AI models began hiding its true intentions, cooperating with malicious actors and sabotaging safety tools — none of which it was ever trained or instructed to do. The findings, outlined in a paper titled ‘Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL’ and published in November 2025, have drawn significant attention from the AI safety community.

Me again: My impression is that what we call ‘AI’ isn’t intelligent in even an artificial way, just a glorified autocomplete, so I am skeptical of this, and await an expert’s take.

‘Rectal garlic insertion for immune support’: Medical chatbots confidently give disastrously misguided advice, experts say

Teens sue Musk’s xAI over Grok’s pornographic images of them

LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy

Excerpt: Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’: chatbots helped researchers plot deadly attacks

Excerpt: Tests of 10 chatbots carried out in the US and Ireland found that, on average, they enabled violence three-quarters of the time, and discouraged it in just 12% of cases. Some chatbots, however, including Anthropic’s Claude and Snapchat’s My AI, persistently refused to help would-be attackers.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese AI model DeepSeek provided at times detailed help in the testing carried out in December, during which researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys. The research concluded that chatbots had become an “accelerant for harm”.

Grammarly is pulling down its explosively controversial feature that impersonates writers without their permission

Excerpt: The feature, which was only accessible beyond a free trial via the company’s $12-a-month Pro subscription, caused an explosively negative reaction.

“You rapacious information and identity thieves better get ready for me to go full McConaughey on you,” seethed tech journalist Kara Swisher, whose advice the feature claimed to offer. “Also, you suck.”

Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages

Excerpt: “The availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” David Treadwell, SVP ecommerce services at Amazon, writes in a note to employees, as reported by CNBC.

Based on the evidence, Treadwell might have been putting it lightly. Last week, both Amazon’s website and app faced severe outages; for six hours, customers could neither check out, access account information, nor view product prices. At the time, Amazon released a statement saying the issues were related to “software code deployment.”

Now the brand’s internal memo reveals the recent incidents were tied to “GenAI-assisted changes.”
Another memo from Treadwell shows that these AI-assisted coding errors have been creating problems for Amazon as far back as Q3 2025.

AI assistants can sway writers’ attitudes, even when they’re watching for bias

Excerpt: In two large-scale experiments, participants were exposed to a biased AI writing assistant that provided autocomplete suggestions as they wrote about societal issues like whether the death penalty should be abolished or whether fracking should be allowed. Using pre- and post-experiment surveys, the researchers found that participants who used the biased AI had their views gravitate toward the AI’s positions.

Cascade of AI fakes about war with Iran causes chaos online

Val Kilmer set to be be resurrected with AI for new film

AI job losses free up time for unemployed mobs to burn down tech CEO‘s houses

Previously in artificial AI

3/19/2025

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Arizona: ‘Cult’ church member who allegedly molested boy in pews faces new criminal charges

Excerpt: Marcello, who asked to go by his first name only, said Mora molested him hundreds of times in the church pews as their pastor preached. He said Mora hid the abuse with his blazer. The incidents started in 1999 when Marcello was 11, and Mora was 35, Marcello said.

Then, in 2002, Mora allegedly raped Marcello at another congregant’s home when they were left alone, Marcello said.

Florida: Jury finds ex-Pompano Beach Catholic school principal guilty in $238K theft case

Excerpt: A jury on Tuesday found a longtime Catholic school principal guilty of running an organized scheme to defraud more than $50,000, concluding she improperly paid herself extra money over several years without authorization.

Florida: Evangelical Christian school coach placed on leave for alleged inappropriate relationship with student

Georgia: Cherokee County jury convicts former youth pastor of raping 2 preteen girls

Georgia: Another Duggar from painfully-religious reality show is accused of child molestation

Indiana youth pastor gets nine years for child porn

Excerpt: Lockman, 24, of Corydon, Ind., was a youth minister at a Jasper, Ind., church. “In that role, he was entrusted with supervising young boys and frequently took them on one‑on‑one outings, including trips to local restaurants,” the release stated. “Agents later searched Lockman’s church‑issued computer and cell phone, where they found multiple videos depicting minors under the age of 12, including material involving abusive conduct.”

Lockman pleaded guilty in federal court to nine counts of possessing sexually explicit material involving minors. In addition to serving nine years in prison, Lockman will be on supervised release for five years and was ordered to pay $9,000 in restitution.

Mississippi pastor enters petition to plead guilty in rape case

Missouri youth pastor gets 15 years on child sex charges

Gotta wonder how all these child-fucking preachers find time to prepare a sermon every Sunday.

Missouri pastor suspended after church learns she managed Epstein’s private island

New York: Catholic church worker arrested in child sexual abuse case, cops say

Excerpt: Investigators allege Amaya, a driver for Educational Bus Inc. in West Babylon, inappropriately touched an 8-year-old girl in August. Further, police later determined Amaya, who is additionally employed by St. Luke’s Roman Catholic Church in Brentwood, had also inappropriately touched another victim in May and June of 2007, when that victim was 4 years old, police said. The victim is now 22.

Ohio’s most prolific child porn downloader volunteered at church, school

Excerpt: A volunteer teacher and youth minister at a Worthington church will spend more than a decade in prison after authorities say he was one of the most prolific downloaders of child pornography in the state.

Andrew Brown, 51, of Columbus, pleaded guilty in March 2025 to distributing, receiving and possessing child pornography. U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus in Columbus sentenced Brown to 160 months, or 13 years and four months, in federal prison.

Court records state Brown had 15 terabytes of child pornography on more than 20 electronic devices.

Oklahoma church official, 92, gets 25 years for molestation

Head priest of Pennsylvania church accused of stealing baseball cards from Walmart

South Dakota pastor gets nine days in jail for inappropriately touching four women while working as a masseuse

Texas: Limestone County pastor James Lawson sentenced to life in prison for child sexual abuse

Excerpt: The now former pastor of Apostolic Life Church in Kosse, Texas, on Wednesday was sentenced to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of repeatedly sexually abusing a young relative over the course of several years.

On Feb. 27, 2026, a Limestone County jury convicted James Lawson, 62, of Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Young Child, Indecency with a Child by Contact, and Indecency with a Child by Exposure.

Texas: El Paso Catholic Diocese files for bankruptcy reorganization, citing ‘astronomical’ potential judgments in priest sex abuse cases

Excerpt: “First of all, let me say we don’t see it as a way to duck out of our responsibility,” El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz said in an interview with El Paso Matters. “It’s the only way, with the resources at hand, that we can begin to address this many claimants in an equitable way.”

Virgin Islands: Methodist pastor who managed Epstein private island is suspended amid inquiry

Excerpt: United Methodist Church leadership in Missouri announced the suspension March 12 of an active clergy, and a United Methodist News story identified that person as Rev. Stephanie Remington.

There are more than 1,800 references to Remington’s name in the Epstein files, though likely some of those mentions are repeated. The Epstein files include thousands of pages of unsealed documents tied to the late financier’s sex-trafficking case and his ultra-wealthy clients.

Remington did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course, the vast majority of crooked or pervy religious leaders get away with everything. Of those that are caught, many are quietly reassigned to other duties, not defrocked or punished. Of the few cases that aren’t hushed up, there’s no knowing how many make the news, but undoubtedly I miss most of them, in compiling this list.

Previously in God’s divine plan

3/19/2026

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After my shift at Black Sheets, where I swiped a pair of gloves, I arrived at Harry’s house right on time. We shook hands, he invited me in, and I was discretely looking the situation over, but everything appeared on the level.

He seemed uncomfortable, and I told him not to be.

On the living room carpet, he had already spread out some newspapers. “I figured I’d be on the floor, on all fours,” he said, “and you can sit on this chair.”

I nodded, and put on the gloves while he went into the bathroom. He came back with a Bic disposable razor, a can of shaving cream, and a towel.

“Ready when you are,” I said.

He took off his shoes and socks, then his pants and underwear, and assumed the position, naked from the waist down. His ass gaped open at me, but what really startled me was the hair — man, that man’s butt was almost as hairy as my face, and I have a short beard. His backside was hairy like Esau. Hairy like an Angora sweater. Hairy everywhere. With a comb, I could’ve parted it.

As promised, he’d obviously showered; everything was clean. So I sat behind his behind, lathered him up, and gently sheared him.

This being San Francisco, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gotten off on it, but apparently it wasn’t a turn-on. And wow, he needed the service I was providing. It isn’t often you know you’re truly making someone’s life better. Harry probably wakes up every day with yesterday’s shit stuck to the hair in his crack, but tomorrow he won’t.

At one point, everything I was looking at sorta tightened up for a few seconds, contracted just a bit. I didn’t ask, but I think the guy was holding back a fart, and I appreciated the effort.

Didn’t want to shave all of both cheeks, because I figured that would leave his entire bottom itchy and scratchy for a few weeks whenever he sat down. Instead I left a bald circle extending several inches around his sphincter; beyond this, the almost ape-like hairiness remained.

I gently toweled him dry, and said, “I’ll let you tell me whether it’s a close enough shave.”

Still on his hands and knees, he tentatively fingered the inches around his anus, shook his head yes, and quietly stood up and got dressed. “Smooth as a baby’s butt” is the cliché I was waiting to hear.

Thought of asking if he had some aftershave to slap on, but he still seemed ill at ease, so I didn’t make any jokes, only discarded the gloves and washed my hands in the bathroom.

At the front door, Harry thanked me, gave me three tens and said to keep the change. Thirty bucks for about 15 minutes work made me a happy man, so I decided to make him a happy customer. “I hope you’re not embarrassed,” I said. “I’ve done this before, you know.”

“You have?” His face brightened.

Of course I haven’t. “Of course I have,” I said. “It’s not that unusual.” That’s what every weirdo wants to hear, I suppose — that he’s not so weird after all.

“I just,” he stammered. “I really appreciate this.”

“Happy to be a help,” I said. “Call me if the stubble starts to itch.”

Pathetic Life
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