Meta has started slowly rolling out its new AI-generated stickers for Messenger, and the results so far are totally unhinged. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced that it would be introducing AI tools to Messenger last week, starting with a limited rollout in the US. On Tuesday night, examples of the kinds of stickers the AI tool generates based on user prompts went viral, and it’s easy to see why. Montreal-based artist Pier-Olivier Desbiens posted a few examples, and they include: Nintendo character Waluigi holding a rifle, a Mickey Mouse-toilet hybrid, child soldiers, a nude Justin Trudeau bending over, and a busty Karl Marx wearing a dress. Desbiens used Meta’s tool to generate stickers of other well-known characters as well, such as a pregnant Shrek and Elmo holding a knife. Stickers generated by other users included Hilary Clinton in jail and President Xi Jinping morphed with Winnie the Pooh—a notorious insult directed at Xi by detractors.

Picketing has begun at Kaiser Permanente hospitals as some 75,000 workers who say understaffing is hurting patient care go on strike in five states and the District of Columbia.

Trump kicked off the second day of his fraud trial in New York on Tuesday by essentially admitting to the crimes. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Trump in September 2022 for fraud, accusing him and his associates of gaining more than $100 million by fraudulently inflating the value of their real estate assets. State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron issued a partial summary judgment last week, ruling that Trump committed business fraud and ordering all his New York business certificates to be canceled, a move that could effectively kill the Trump Organization as it exists today. The trial, which began Monday, is to determine how much Trump and his co-defendants owe in damages.

Critics say placing the phosphate waste in roadways could put human and environmental health at risk. In March of last year, the Fortune 500 company asked the federal agency to take less than 500 tons of its phosphate byproduct, called phosphogypsum, and blend it into a test roadway at the company’s New Wales facility in Mulberry. Now, at the request of the governor’s Florida Department of Transportation, Mosaic wants to raise that amount to 1,200 tons — roughly the weight of six 747 jets — and increase the length of the test road by 2,000 feet, according to a letter from Mosaic to the Environmental Protection Agency sent at the end of August. The company’s revised proposal came less than two months after DeSantis signed a bill that will allow the state transportation department to study the waste as a test ingredient in road construction. Mosaic said the state has since “taken an interest” in their pilot project. That bill was lobbied by Mosaic, which paid $25,000 in May for a fundraiser for the bill’s legislative sponsor at a Bowling Green golf getaway formerly owned by the company. That was after the company wrote a $200,000 check to the Republican Party of Florida in January, campaign finance records show. That month, the company was listed as a sponsor of DeSantis’ inauguration ceremony, a designation reserved for major donors and allies.

YES… HA HA HA… YES!

Sloppy cops said a woman fabricated a video of her daughter's teammate. She's suing for defamation. Who is at fault when the deepfakes aren't fake at all?

A surreal train ride between Chicago and New Orleans proves that Amtrak still has a lot to offer. (Not including speed or the food.)

An interview between Armchair Expert host Dax Shepard and Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness ended in tears.

Among people under 65, chronic illnesses erase more than twice as many years as overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined, a Post examination found.

The FBI has interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the People of Praise (PoP), a secretive Christian sect that counts conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a lifelong member, according to sources familiar with the matter. The individuals were contacted following a years-long effort by a group called PoP Survivors, who have called for the South Bend-based sect to be investigated for leaders’ handling of sexual abuse allegations. The body, which has 54 members, has alleged that abuse claims were routinely mishandled or covered up for decades in order to protect the close-knit faith group. It is not clear whether the FBI has launched a formal investigation into the PoP.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier receive award for ultra-short pulses of light, which have enabled the close study of electrons.

Right around the time the gales of the financial crisis were tearing up Wall Street in 2009, Meredith Whitney started her own financial research firm. Whitney, a stock market analyst, had predicted the crash of the previous year, and among the journalists who had sought her out had been Michael Lewis. When her new Manhattan office opened and she threw “a party for all the muckety-mucks”, she invited Lewis. He had just published a magazine article calling Wall Street’s titans greedy and stupid, so thrusting him into a gathering of those selfsame titans was like taking a Broadway heckler into the play’s dressing rooms. “But all these former heads of investment banks, all these current bankers – they ran, not walked, to the office, just to meet him,” Whitney said. “One hedge fund manager walked in with 15 copies of Lewis’s books. Michael signed them all.” Lewis enjoys a rare kind of celebrity among the moneyed men and women of the US. They believe he gets them, that he is the Hemingway of their bullring. He used to be one of them, after all: a Salomon Brothers bond salesman in the late 1980s, and therefore part of the extravagant avarice that defined Wall Street in that decade. Then he quit to write a memoir about it, Liar’s Poker. It was the first in a series of blockbusters about the thin top slice of American society: the one in which Whitney and her muckety-mucks reside, alongside other mavens, savants and powerbrokers. They drive its commerce and politics, its sports and culture – and Lewis is their bard. He’s the kind of writer Vanity Fair will call upon to interview Barack Obama one day, Arnold Schwarzenegger the next. When a rumour surfaced that Vanity Fair used to pay Lewis $10 a word – while most journalists otherwise languish in the 50-cent range – it almost didn’t matter if it was true. (It was, it turned out.) The rumour merely confirmed what everyone knew: Lewis is the most prestigious narrator of American life.

Thai police arrested a teenage gunman suspected of killing two foreigners and wounding five people on Tuesday in a shooting spree at a luxury Bangkok mall, the latest high-profile gun violence to rock the country in recent years.

Pakistan’s government announced a major crackdown Tuesday on migrants in the country illegally, saying it would expel them starting next month and raising alarm among foreigners without documentation who include an estimated 1.7 million Afghans. The country’s caretaker Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti said the crackdown was not aimed at Afghans and would apply to all nationalities, though the vast majority of migrants in the country are Afghans. The campaign comes amid strained relations between Pakistan and neighboring, Taliban-led Afghanistan over what the Pakistani government says are attacks in Pakistan by Taliban-allied militants who go back and forth across the countries’ shared 2,611-kilometer (1,622-mile) border and who find shelter in Afghanistan. Bugti said that any migrants in Pakistan illegally should go back to their countries voluntarily before the end of October to avoid mass arrest and forced deportation. He said the government planned to confiscate the property and assets of illegal migrants, and would set up a special phone line to offer rewards to members of the public who tip off authorities about such migrants.

A Texas man accidentally shot a child while officiating a wedding in Lancaster County on Saturday, the sheriff’s office says. Chief Deputy Ben Houchin said deputies were sent to a wedding at Hillside Events near Denton on a report of a gunshot wound. Deputies learned that 62-year-old Michael Gardner, the wedding’s officiant, fired a gun to get everyone’s attention. “He was going to fire in the air, and as he did that, it slipped and went off,” Houchin said.

A new report says the small plane that crashed in rural Alaska earlier this month, killing the husband [Eugene "Buzzy" Peltola Jr.] of U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, was carrying more than 500 pounds of moose meat and antlers.

Democratic Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar was carjacked at gunpoint Monday night near his residence in the Navy Yard area of Washington, D.C., just blocks from the Capitol.

The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be. For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge. In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.

The company once described the Duwamish, one of the country’s most contaminated waterways, as “a natural collector” for its wastes. The Port of Seattle and Boeing accuse each other of failing to pay their fair shares for the cleanup.

A year after the world's richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.