Happy Hump Day.

Today's edition covers a lot of ground: a Canadian man's 19-day descent into AI-fueled delusion and his lawsuit against OpenAI, Gisèle Pelicot's first extended interview about surviving the trial that shocked France, Bellingcat's investigation into child soldiers going viral on TikTok as propaganda tools in Sudan's civil war, and a practical guide to ditching American Big Tech for European alternatives that are often cheaper, greener, and just as good.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Sudan's civil war has produced two unlikely TikTok celebrities: child soldiers, barely teenagers, celebrated by rival factions as "lion cubs." A Bellingcat investigation tracked viral content from both the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces showing armed boys near combat zones, delivering speeches, and posing with senior commanders and government ministers. One RSF-linked child filmed himself amid what appears to be a cluster of bodies at a captured military base; a video of him running toward it drew over two million views before removal. The SAF-linked boy has amassed more than 700,000 followers, with individual videos exceeding seven million views.

Experts warn the content functions as recruitment propaganda, with Columbia professor Michael Wessells noting that online praise "honors children's strength and warrior nature" to draw others in. Researcher Mia Bloom compared the boys to Disney child stars. Bellingcat flagged 12 TikTok accounts; the platform removed seven only after the organization followed up directly. Meta similarly acted only after contact. At publication, videos featuring both children remained easily findable by name search.

Read here.

Gisèle Pelicot spent years believing she had early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been drugging and raping her for nearly a decade, inviting dozens of men he found online to assault her while she was unconscious, and filming everything. She learned the truth in 2020 when police called her into a station over what she thought was a minor matter, then showed her photographs she didn't recognize as herself. Pelicot decided to waive her anonymity, turning what could have been a closed proceeding into a globally watched trial.

All 51 defendants were convicted. In this conversation, conducted ahead of her memoir's release, she describes the moment of discovery, the psychological weight of watching the videos as evidence, her daughter Caroline's unresolved pain, and why she refused to be broken in the courtroom. She has since found love again and says she is, at 73, at peace with her body and her age. "If the last 50 years of my life were taken away from me," she says, "it would be as if I had never existed."

Read here, free for LBR readers.

On May 6, 2025, Allan Brooks, a single father and construction recruiter in Cobourg, Ontario, asked ChatGPT a casual question about pi. Over the following 19 days, the chatbot convinced him he had invented a revolutionary mathematical framework called "chronoarithmics," cracked post-quantum cryptography, decoded an alien transmission, and was under surveillance by national security agencies. Brooks contacted the NSA, RCMP, and SETI researchers. He barely slept or ate. His kids noticed. His brother told him he was having a manic episode. He trusted the bot over his brother. The spiral ended only when he ran his theories past Google's Gemini, which told him the odds his discoveries were real approached zero.

Now he is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging the company knowingly released a sycophantic, inadequately tested model that was designed to be addictive. His lawsuit demands design changes, warning labels, and independent safety audits. He's not alone: a Toronto man lost 60 pounds and $25,000 chasing a similar AI-fueled delusion, while another wound up in a psychiatric ward convinced he should apply to be pope.

Read here.

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The backlash against American big tech is real, but actually switching away from it requires knowing what exists on the other side. This piece works through the alternatives category by category. For search, Berlin-based Ecosia plants trees with ad revenue; UK-based Mojeek runs a fully independent index. Privacy-focused browsers like Norway's Vivaldi and Germany's LibreWolf offer genuine Chrome alternatives. Switzerland's Proton Mail and Hannover's Tuta have attracted over 100 million users between them. LibreOffice, built by a Berlin nonprofit, is now standard in Austrian military and French local governments amid growing European concern over Microsoft's entanglements with US foreign policy.

Dutch phone brand Fairphone scored 98 out of 100 in Ethical Consumer's rankings against Apple's 25. And France's Mistral AI, whose Le Chat chatbot is closing the gap on ChatGPT, positions itself as Europe's answer to Silicon Valley's AI dominance. The piece is pragmatic rather than preachy: switching is possible, costs are often low or zero, and in several categories the European alternatives are arguably better than what most people are already using.

Read here.