Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, a pioneering political activist, academic and historian who founded one of the first Chicano Studies programs offered by a major U.S. university, has died at 93.Acuña’s landmark 1972 textbook “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” continues to be taught in schools.He died Monday, said Carmen Ramos Chandler, a spokesperson for California State University, Northridge, where he taught for nearly half a century.Although Acuña described himself as a teacher, he was also a prolific writer who authored more than a dozen books, several dozen academic papers and scores of essays and opinion pieces.He founded…

For generations, Ida Huddleston and her family have owned a farm in northern Kentucky. And they’ve turned down at least one multimillion-dollar offer to preserve it. Last year, a “major artificial intelligence company” offered them $26 million to sell part of their farm for a proposed data center, according to a recent report from WKRC. Huddleston and her family declined, saying they didn’t want a data center built near them or on any of their 1,200 acres of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky. “They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not,” Huddleston, who is 82, told Local 12…

It’s shaping up to be a big month of verdicts for Meta. Loading audio narration… While jurors in Los Angeles deliberate over Meta and Google’s liability in a case about social media addiction, in New Mexico, Meta was found liable in a separate case about child safety on its platforms.”New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez in a statement to Business Insider.In court, the state proposed to the jury penalties of up to roughly $2.2 billion…

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A New Mexico jury ruled Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case.Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s…

OpenAI is pulling the plug on the Sora app — at least in the current form.The company confirmed it will discontinue Sora as a consumer app and API, marking a sharp pivot away from one of its splashiest generative video experiments.”We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. “As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”The discontinuation is a notable turn for a product that once embodied OpenAI’s creative ambitions. When Sora…

For developers using AI, “vibe coding” right now comes down to babysitting every action or risking letting the model run unchecked. Anthropic says its latest update to Claude aims to eliminate that choice by letting the AI decide which actions are safe to take on its own — with some limits.   The move reflects a broader shift across the industry, as AI tools are increasingly designed to act without waiting for human approval. The challenge is balancing speed with control: too many guardrails slows things down, while too few can make systems risky and unpredictable. Anthropic’s new “auto mode,” now…

A federal judge in San Francisco lit into the Pentagon on Tuesday for its attempt to blacklist Anthropic following a dispute over its AI.”It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic,” Judge Rita Lin said at a hearing on Tuesday to decide whether the government’s “supply chain risk” label can stand while Anthropic’s case against the Department of War proceeds.On March 3, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth formally notified Anthropic that he was labeling the company and its products as a supply chain risk, the first time such a designation had been applied to a US company. The designation is akin…

At a time when AI slop is flooding music streaming platforms, Spotify is beta testing a new “Artist Profile Protection” feature that allows artists to review releases before they go live on their profiles. The idea behind the new tool is to give artists more control over which tracks are associated with their name on the streaming service. “Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse,” Spotify wrote in a blog post. “That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and…

With an overflowing war chest from its $5 billion raise that closed last month (not to mention billions in revenue), Databricks is acquiring. The company, best known for its cloud data analytics platform, announced on Tuesday that it was launching a new security product called Lakewatch. Lakewatch takes Databricks’ ability to store massive amounts of data and performs classic Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tasks, like detecting and investigating threats. Only it does so with the help of AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Databricks bought two startups to underpin this new product: Antimatter, in an undisclosed-until-now deal that…

Earlier this week, pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its partner Valneva announced that an experimental Lyme disease vaccine showed more than 70% efficacy in late-stage clinical trials.The candidate, PF-07307405, showed 73.2% efficacy in reducing confirmed cases of Lyme disease cases after the fourth and final dose was administered when compared to a placebo.However, the companies said there were fewer than anticipated cases of Lyme disease during the trial period and the study missed an important statistical benchmark that measures confidence, falling just short of the required 20% threshold at 15.8%.ER visits for tick bites near record levels this summer across USExperts in…