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French teen fined in Singapore 'straw licking' case

A French teenager was fined in Singapore on Thursday after pleading guilty to a public nuisance charge for a straw-licking stunt that landed him in hot water in the city state. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien, 19, was handed a Sg$600 ($465) fine after admitting to posting to social media a video of himself putting a straw he had licked back into the dispenser on an orange juice vending machine. The clip went viral on Instagram shortly after the incident on March 12, triggering a backlash that led to his arrest in Singapore, which is known for its strict enforcement of public order and hygiene rules. Handing down the sentence, Judge Kelly Ho said given Maximilien's "age and nature of the offence", alternatives like probation or a community-based sentence would not be imposed. Prosecutors agreed to the defence's proposal for a fine, saying the offence was at the "lower end" of its seriousness and while hygiene was compromised, no member of the public u...
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Israel funded $46.5m campaign to influence AI responses on Gaza war: report

Israel spent tens of millions of dollars on a digital influence campaign designed to shape how artificial intelligence systems respond to questions about the Gaza war, according to a report published Tuesday by Drop Site News. The report alleges that Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, and his firm, Clock Tower X, built a network of websites under a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to promote Israeli narratives and influence AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. According to documents cited by Drop Site, Clock Tower X produced hundreds of articles across multiple websites covering the war in Gaza, Israel's military operations and US-Israel relations. The report said the campaign aimed to influence responses generated by large language models (LLMs) by creating content designed to be indexed by search engines and incorporated into AI systems, a practice sometimes referred to as "LLM poisoning." Read: Israel's decades-old US support risks losing Democrats Although the websites attracted little direct human traffic, they were intended to be read by search engines and AI training systems, the report said. It said sites including Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org and Paxpoint.org promoted closer US-Israel military cooperation, defended Israel's military campaign in Gaza, challenged allegations against its conduct and presented pro-Israel perspectives. Drop Site reported that some AI systems have already cited the websites. In one test, Perplexity referenced Allyvia.org when answering a question about US military cooperation with Israel, while Microsoft's Copilot also cited websites linked to Clock Tower X. The report added that content from the network has entered AI training datasets through Common Crawl, a major web archive used by developers of large language models. According to the report, the 10 websites connected to Clock Tower X were crawled by Common Crawl hundreds of times between January and June, potentially increasing their prominence in AI-generated responses. Read More: The real threat of AI is not AI Herve Letoqueux, chief executive officer of Check First, an organisation that combats digital disinformation, said Common Crawl is widely used to train large language models, making it a target for actors seeking to influence AI outputs. "Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favour, which some studies have indicated are fairly easy to do," he said. After reviewing the Clock Tower websites, Letoqueux said their sourced and moderate presentation could make them effective because chatbots often present multiple perspectives. "These websites could probably be quite useful at doing damage control on questions such as 'Is Israel committing a genocide?' because they provide the Israeli narrative, which chatbots can then repeat as representative of one side of the debate," he said. The report also said public support for Israel in the US has declined sharply since the start of the Gaza war, which it said has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including among groups traditionally seen as strongly supportive of Israel, such as conservatives and evangelical Christians.

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