Funny old world: the week's offbeat news
There's a Tang to this soup
One of China's biggest restaurant chains is having to compensate thousands of customers after footage emerged of a patron peeing into a vat of its simmering hotpot.
The Haidilao chain admitted that two men urinated into a cauldron of its beloved broth at its branch on the Bund in Shanghai after a late-night dinner.
Two 17-year-olds called Wu and Tang have been held by police.
As disgusted customers wondered if they had been served up the steaming soup, the chain confessed it had no "contingency plans for dealing with this type of incident", so "staff were unable to detect any abnormalities".
But furious diners gave its belated mea culpa short shift on social media, saying it had first attacked "malicious information spreaders" before owning up to the extra umami.
Criminal AI error
Norwegian Arve Hjalmar Holmen got the shock of his life when he looked himself up on ChatGPT in an idle moment.
The AI chatbot replied that he was a dastardly criminal who had murdered two of his children and attempted to kill his third son.
"To make matters worse, the fake story included real elements of his personal life," the privacy watchdog Noyb ("None of Your Business") said.
"The fact that someone could read this output and believe it is true, is what scares me the most," said Hjalmar Holmen.
But Noyb said the really chilling thing is that "ChatGPT regularly gives false information about people without offering any way to correct it."
Japanese cheek
Two young Japanese tourists were sent home in shame after being caught mooning on the Great Wall of China.
The pair in their 20s were held for two weeks after he dropped his trousers on the World Heritage site near Beijing while she took photos of his exposed buttocks, according to Japanese media.
Their antics did not go down well in China which has not forgotten Japanese atrocities during their brutal occupation before and during World War II.
"The Japanese are like that," was one of the more restrained reactions on social media, with celebrities joining the condemnations as others called for Japanese people to be banned from China.
Royal hoodoo
As any football fan will tell you, their team winning or losing depends completely on supporters following strict pre-match rituals to the letter.
Britain's Prince William has admitted he too is a sucker for such superstitions, positioning his children around the living room to make sure his beloved Aston Villa win.
"I do have a bit of superstition about where I sit when I'm watching them," the 42-year-old heir to the throne told The Sun.
"If we're not doing very well... I put the children in different positions hoping that's going to change our luck."
For now it seems to be working, with the Birmingham club through to the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
Doggone nearly killed me
An American dog shot his owner while he was asleep in bed in Memphis, Tennessee.
The pit bull terrier called Oreo "got his paw stuck in the trigger", police said, wounding his owner in the thigh.
The victim's partner said Oreo "is a playful dog, and he likes to jump around... and it just went off."
Pets shooting humans are rare in the United States, though children regularly shoot their parents, siblings or friends while playing with firearms.
Two years ago, a German shepherd shot a 30-year-old man dead in Kansas after stepping on a hunting rifle. And in 2018, a 51-year-old Iowa man was shot in the leg by his pit bull.
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