Supermarket app recommends ‘poison sandwiches’

Two slices of bread — (Image credit: Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

A supermarket’s AI app has recommended that customers create recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes. The app, created by New Zealand supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, tells customers to enter various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a recipe, along “with cheery commentary”, said The Guardian. A spokesperson for the supermarket said a “small minority” has “tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose”.

Driver crashes into second floor

A driver was injured after “bizarrely” crashing a car into the second floor of a home in Pennsylvania, said Fox News. Firefighters arrived to find the driver’s side of the vehicle lodged into a second-floor room. The authorities were not immediately sure how the vehicle ended up on the second floor, but they have said that the driver struck a culvert pipe, which may have caused them to lose control. It took emergency crews around three hours to remove the vehicle from the home.

A man tried to smuggle 14 live snakes through a Chinese border by stuffing the serpents in his pockets. After agents at Huanggang Customs noticed the man looking nervous and avoiding eye contact with them, they asked to examine his belongings and ended up finding 14 snakes wrapped up in cotton socks and stockings. The reptiles were placed inside plastic containers and handed over to authorities, reported Metro.

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i news site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.