Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

MANCHESTER, England (AP) — Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Manchester on Monday to recognize his contribution on and off the field since joining the club in 2016.Guardiola was presented with an honorary doctorate by the university’s chancellor at a ceremony to honor his success with City, including leading the team to six Premier League titles and the Champions League, and in the community, notably through his Guardiola Sala Foundation.“I have spent nine years here and it has become home,” Guardiola said. “The people, the culture, my incredible football club, my colleagues…

PUERTO LA PLATA, Dominican Republic (AP) — The attorney for Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco said Monday he will ask the court to exonerate his client of all charges in a sexual abuse case involving a girl who was 14 years old at the time of the alleged crimes.Franco, who was charged in July 2024 and is on supervised release, could face up to 30 years in prison if found guilty.“He didn’t commit the acts he’s accused of,” Teodosio Jáquez told The Associated Press at the end of the fourth hearing at the Collegiate Court of Puerto Plata, a…

Mark Cuban is sounding the alarm on Bluesky’s declining engagement — and he’s not pulling his punches.In a series of Bluesky posts, the billionaire investor and entrepreneur criticized the platform for fostering an echo chamber that he said was driving users away and inadvertently boosting traffic back to Elon Musk’s X.”The lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage,” Cuban wrote, linking to a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “BlueSky’s decline stems from never hearing from the other side.”Once known for “great give-and-take discussions on politics and news,” Cuban said Bluesky had become a monoculture where dissent was…

Claude’s blog is no more. A week after TechCrunch profiled Anthropic’s experiment to task the company’s Claude AI models with writing blog posts, Anthropic wound down the blog and redirected the address to its homepage. Sometime over the weekend, the Claude Explains blog disappeared — along with its initial few posts. A source familiar tells TechCrunch the blog was a “pilot” meant to help Anthropic’s team combine customer requests for explainer-type “tips and tricks” content with marketing goals. Claude Explains, which had a dedicated page on Anthropic’s website and was edited for accuracy by humans, was populated by posts on…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that programming AI is similar to “the way you program a person” — and that “human” is the new coders’ language.”The thing that’s really, really quite amazing is the way you program an AI is like the way you program a person,” Huang told London Tech Week on Monday.Huang shared an example, saying, “You say, ‘You are an incredible poet. You are deeply steeped in Shakespeare, and I would like you to write a poem to describe today’s keynote.’ Without very much effort, this AI would help you generate such a wonderful poem.”And when it…

CNN  —  A judge on Monday dismissed Justin Baldoni’s $400 million defamation lawsuit against Hollywood power couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, a major development in the ongoing civil litigation between former co-stars Lively and Baldoni. In January, Baldoni sued Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, alleging that the Hollywood couple sought to “destroy” him and his career, after hijacking his film, “It Ends With Us.” Baldoni’s complaint escalated the ongoing legal battle stemming from the film that Baldoni directed and co-starred in with Lively. In a statement, Lively’s lawyers Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb called the ruling “a total…

WASHINGTON (AP) — When children of wealthy families reach adulthood, they often benefit from the largesse of parents in the form of a trust fund. It’s another way they get a leg up on less affluent peers, who may receive nothing at all — or even be expected to support their families.But what if all children — regardless of their family’s circumstances — could get a financial boost when they turn 18?That’s the idea behind a House GOP proposal backed by President Donald Trump. It would create accounts for all babies born in the U.S. over the next four years…

Qualcomm has agreed to acquire Alphawave Semi, a U.K.-based semiconductor company focused on high-speed data center connectivity, for around $2.4 billion. According to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, the deal will help Qualcomm grow its data center business. “The combined teams share the goal of building advanced technology solutions and enabling next-level connected computing performance across a wide array of high-growth areas, including data center infrastructure,” Amon said in a press release. Qualcomm’s acquisition of Alphawave, which makes a range of wired connectivity and compute technologies, comes a few months after the bigger chip company bought the generative AI division of…

ChatGPT’s conversational voice mode just got an upgrade. Over the weekend, OpenAI rolled out an update to Advanced Voice, the feature that lets users have dialogues with ChatGPT out loud. The company says ChatGPT’s voices now sound more natural and fluid, with “subtler intonation,” “realistic cadence” (including pauses and emphasis), and more “on-point expressiveness” for emotions like empathy and sarcasm. Voice mode now also allows users to translate languages more easily. Ask ChatGPT to interpret, and it will continue translating the conversation until you tell it to stop or switch to another language. The feature is available for all paid…

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — The University of Michigan said it’s cutting ties with a private security company that was accused of following pro-Palestinian activists on and off campus.The university said it found the actions of one security company employee “disturbing, unacceptable and unethical.” It did not elaborate. “Going forward, we are terminating all contracts with external vendors to provide plainclothes security on campus,” President Domenico Grasso said in a statement Sunday.In a Guardian story last week, students said they were surveilled around Ann Arbor. The news outlet posted video from a member of a Muslim group who decided to…