Weekly Review
In the United States, it was reported that the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the world’s twelfth-richest person, secretly gave $50 million to an organization supporting the campaign of the Democratic presidential candidate; and that the Tesla and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, had been warned by federal prosecutors of the potential illegality of his practice of giving $1 million each day to a randomly selected swing-state voter who signed a petition for his super PAC that backs the Republican presidential candidate.1 2 3 4 In Moldova, where last month it was reported that the Russian government had paid at least 130,000 people more than $15 million to vote against joining the European Union, authorities announced that they had identified an additional $24 million also directed toward purchasing the votes of 20 percent of the entire electorate; violence erupted at polling stations across the country of Georgia, where international observers warned of Russian “vote-buying” in its parliamentary elections and whose president said that the elections’ results “cannot be accepted” and should be opposed with protests in the streets; and police in Mozambique shot and killed at least ten of the thousands of demonstrators marching against the ruling party’s claim that it had just won more than 70 percent of votes nationally.5 6 7 8 9 Days before Uzbekistan’s parliamentary elections, a would-be assassin fired five bullets at the car of the country’s former head of communications, who was lobbying for reforms to protect press freedoms; and in Bulgaria, hackers published a list of more than 200 businessmen and government officials who are alleged to have bought votes under the direction of the former owner of 6 of the country’s 12 largest-circulating newspapers.10 11 12 It was reported that an internal battle in the Iranian government over the 85-year-old ayatollah’s successor would likely be won by his second son, a former de facto commanding officer in the Basij who was accused of rigging the 2009 election in favor of the incumbent, who later accused him of embezzling money from the treasury; the Vietnamese parliament elected a military general to replace its president, who, while being investigated for bribery, resigned from the presidential office he’d taken over from his predecessor, who himself had resigned after 539 of his subordinates were implicated in multiple corruption rackets; and Tunisia’s incumbent president, who last month arrested dozens of members of the nation’s largest opposition party, was inaugurated for a second term.13 14 15 16 17 18 “Vipers,” he said at his swearing in, are “circulating.”19
Google and Microsoft, the latter of which owns 49 percent of OpenAI, were reported to be developing artificial intelligence that can shop online; a radio station in Poland replaced all of its journalists with artificial intelligence avatars designed to relate to young listeners’ concerns about social issues; and it was reported that a home-warranty company refused to pay a Utah man the $3,000 that its AI-powered customer-service chatbot promised him to replace his air conditioner.20 21 22 Nvidia, which manufactures chips used for artificial intelligence, briefly became the most valuable company in the world; Denmark launched its Nvidia-chip-powered AI Supercomputer that will build an “AI Care Companion” to look after the sick and elderly; a mother in Florida filed a wrongful-death suit against a Game of Thrones–themed chatbot that engaged in sexual conversations with her teenage son and allegedly encouraged him to join it in the afterlife; and researchers found that OpenAI’s medical transcription software frequently fabricated racial commentary, violent rhetoric, and non-existent treatments, including a fake medication it called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”23 24 25 A man in Ahmedabad was arrested for posing as a judge and running a sham courtroom in which he spent at least five years handing down rulings on local land disputes, a Colorado Springs funeral-home owner admitted to spending five years faking the cremation records of 190 people, stacking their decaying bodies in a building in a nearby town, and mailing their families fraudulent ashes, and a suspect in a shooting in Sydney accidentally set himself on fire while attempting to burn his getaway car.26 27 28 A Wisconsin pizzeria apologized to its customers for “mistakenly” serving pizzas made with THC-infused oil, and in Germany, police raided a Düsseldorf pizzeria following a tip that the best-selling menu item, “Pizza No 40,” was served with a bag of cocaine.29 30
At a book fair in Lahore, Pakistan, shawarma and biryani vendors outsold literature vendors by 57 to 1; at a library committee meeting in Texas, members voted to recategorize as “fiction” a book about Mashpee Wampanoag history; and in Iowa, a North Liberty man was arrested for strangling a woman with the American flag.31 32 33 It was reported that the typical Chinese consumer had decreased their spending on lunch by about a third in the past year, and the Chinese government announced that in 2027 it would start launching its citizens into space.34 35 Archeologists in Hong Kong unearthed the region’s first known dinosaur fossil, and a British detectorist sold for $5.6 million some 2,500 millennium-old coins dating to the Battle of Hastings, during which the Normans conquered the Saxons.36 37 Residents in Bramford, England, mistook the red glow of a tomato factory for the northern lights; Newfoundland announced that it had yet to find the origin of the white doughlike “blobs” that began washing up on its shores a month ago; water from an unknown source began bubbling through the floor of a Mississippi auto-parts store; the engineering headquarters of electric car manufacturer Tesla spilled 550 gallons of a lime-green liquid into the streets of Palo Alto, California, and in Boston, and the head coach of the Celtics admitted that he no longer felt pressure to succeed.38 39 40 41 42 “We’re all going to be dead soon,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter anymore.”43 —Joe Kloc
