Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
PARIS (AP) — A French lawmaker told a Paris court she wants “the truth” to emerge from the trial of a former senator accused of drugging her to abuse her, describing a terrifying experience marked by fear she could be raped. Joël Guerriau, 68, has admitted serving Sandrine Josso a drink spiked with MDMA, known as ecstasy, but says it was an accident.The trial brought national attention to drug-facilitated assault in the country already marked by the landmark drugging-and-rape case that turned Gisèle Pelicot into a global icon of the fight against sexual violence.On the trial’s second day Tuesday, the…
Help desk automation is a billion-dollar industry, and one of the most likely to be disrupted by tech built upon AI. Major players like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks currently dominate the space, but lots of smaller startups are betting that reshuffling workflows will give them a chance to cut in. Risotto is one of those startups, and after today, it will have plenty of runway to test its theory. The company on Tuesday said it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and SurgePoint Capital. Designed to…
Phia’s team is locked in — literally. The startup is laser-focused on building an AI shopping agent, but also, after a snowstorm barreled through New York City, Phia founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni can’t leave their respective apartments. So it’s a rarity that when I chat with the former Stanford roommates and best friends, they are not together, nor are they in the Phia office. “We were like, ‘It’s okay, stay home.’ It’s dangerous. Nobody needs to go to the office,” Kianni told TechCrunch, laughing. But while she and Gates hunkered down at home, many of their employees still…
It might sound crazy to some, launching an entirely new product line while your flagship business has shed two-thirds of its paper value. But Howie Liu, the founder and CEO of Airtable, suggests it’s the sanest thing he could do. The company that investors valued at $11.7 billion during the zero-interest-rate fervor of 2021 now trades on secondary markets at roughly $4 billion. But Airtable has raised $1.4 billion total, and Liu says the company still has half of that in the bank while “throwing off cash.” The valuation collapse affected investor returns and employee stock options but didn’t undermine…
Jury selection is set to start in a trial over whether Meta, TikTok and YouTube fuel excessive social media use by children in ways that harm their mental health.At the heart of the case are allegations by a 19-year-old plaintiff, identified only as “KGM,” who claims that using social media from a young age caused her to become addicted to the technology, which led her to develop depression and suicidal thoughts.Potential bellwetherLegal experts have said the trial could be a bellwether for more than a thousand similar cases brought against social media players in recent years. Depending on the outcome,…
BONHAM, Texas (AP) — Three brothers — ages 6, 8 and 9 — died in Texas during the massive winter storm gripping the U.S. after falling through an icy pond across the street from a house where they were staying, authorities said Tuesday.The brothers fell into a private pond Monday north of Bonham, a rural community of about 10,000 people near the Oklahoma border, the Fannin County Sheriff’s Office said. First responders and a neighbor pulled the two older boys from the water and the youngest sibling was recovered after an extensive search of the pond, according to the sheriff.Their…
Athletic footwear has entered a new era of ambition. No longer content to promise just comfort or performance, Nike claims its shoes can activate the brain, heighten sensory awareness and even improve concentration by stimulating the bottom of your feet.“By studying perception, attention and sensory feedback, we’re tapping into the brain-body connection in new ways,” said Nike’s chief science officer, Matthew Nurse, in the company’s press release for the shoes. “It’s not just about running faster — it’s about feeling more present, focused and resilient.”Other brands like Naboso sell “neuro-insoles,” socks and other sensory-based footwear to stimulate the nervous system.It’s…
Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Don’t eat at these times. Eat this food and you’ll lose weight. With society’s obsession with food, health and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms and even health care offices.But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and…
China’s Moonshot AI, which is backed by the likes of Alibaba and HongShan (formerly Sequioa China), today released a new open-source model, Kimi K2.5, which understands text, image, and video. The company said that the model was trained on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens, and that’s why it is natively multimodal. It added that the models are good at coding tasks and handling agent swarms — an orchestration where multiple agents work together. In released benchmarks, the model matches the performance of the proprietary peers and even beats them in certain tasks. For instance, in the coding benchmark,…
AI is remaking creative industries at breakneck speed. And the growing pile of AI tools is turning the creative process into a game of model-hopping as artists, designers, and writers bounce between different platforms.Founded in Brooklyn, New York, in 2024, FLORA wants to help creatives streamline those processes. On Tuesday, FLORA revealed it had raised $42 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures. The company has raised $52 million in funding to date.FLORA combines the latest AI models — such as Google’s Nano Banana and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.1 — into a single interface that lets teams collaborate on…