31 h. ago Victory for mom who claims child was sexually abused by AI chatbot that drove him to suicide

A mother who claims her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III was sexually abused and driven to suicide by an AI chatbot has secured a major victory in her ongoing legal case.

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43 h. ago Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li review – a shattering account of losing two sons

The novelist’s meditation on grief, memory and radical acceptance contains both horror and comfortIn this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use “mourning” or “grieving” because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” she writes, and words can only “fall short”.She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. “Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,” she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the “a...

Politics

3 d. ago Dad makes bizarre revelation about what IVF clinic suicide bomber son hated

Guy Edward Bartkus, 25, detonated a car bomb that damaged the American Reproductive Centers building in Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles. His father maintains he was not a terrorist or 'anti-life.'

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6 d. ago ‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons

As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedyAs the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him. Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page. “With Vincent’s book there was that joy of meeting him again in the book, hearing him, seeing him, it was like he was alive,” she says. The book had 16 chapters, one for each year of his life, and Li felt she could have spent the rest of her life writing it, and also that she could not linger.When her younger son James die...

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1 week ago Nebraska man stabbed entire family to death before turning knife on himself, police say

The apparent murder-suicide occurred just hours before suspect Jeremy Koch’s eldest son was due to attend his high school graduation

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2 w. ago The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie; The Incandescent by Emily Tesh; Land of Hope by Cate Baum; A Line You Have Traced by Roisin DunnettThe Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25) Bookish Brother Diaz is stunned to be made vicar of the Chapel of Holy Expediency, whose congregation – a necromancer, a vampire, a werewolf, and an elf – are tasked with escorting a claimant to the imperial throne to her coronation. This is Suicide Squad in a sideways medieval Europe, where instead of the son of god we have a daughter, instead of a cross, a wheel, and instead of Byzantium, Troy. The worldbuilding is one of the novel’s chief pleasures, combining the familiar – crusades, religious schisms and territorial disputes – with strange and alien elements, such as the lost empire of Carthage, which built most of the world’s major cities before succumbing to its own dark magic. Against this backdrop, the sardonic crew of the Chapel make their way through a series of elaborate, violent set-pieces, barely ...

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