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Google has spent the past year dealing with two of the biggest threats in its 25-year history: the rise of generative AI and the growing drumbeat of regulation. AI, in particular, has shaken the company to its core: it’s made big search changes, realigned the Search, Android, and hardware teams around AI, and launched its own Gemini AI model to capitalize on the opportunity.

Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings.

Investors, at least, are eating it up: Google parent company Alphabet has finally officially hit and maintained a $2 trillion market cap for a whole day of trading after briefly touching $2 trillion in November 2021. Google is the fourth most valuable public company in the world, behind Nvidia ($2.2 trillion), Apple ($2.6 trillion), and Microsoft ($3.0 trillion). Amazon is currently at $1.8 trillion, and Meta is at $1.1 trillion.

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A normal if windy work day went south for one Japanese bureaucrat when documents containing residents' personal information were blown away in a real-life slapstick mishap.

The official in central Japan's Aichi region was using a trolley to transport a cardboard box filled with documents from one building to another when, to their horror, it toppled over.

Despite frantic efforts by the official to collect reams of paper strewn across the road by the wind, three sheets were lost, Aichi Prefecture said in an apology statement this week.

"More than 10 other officials joined the search" for the missing documents until sunset, prefectural official Akira Kato told AFP on Friday.


Original news:

A Maryland high school athletic director is facing criminal charges after police say he used artificial intelligence to duplicate the voice of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the community to believe Eiswert said racist and antisemitic things about teachers and students.

"We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic," Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough told reporters during a news conference Thursday. "It's been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology."

Dazhon Darien, 31, was arrested Thursday on charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness after a monthslong investigation from the Baltimore County Police Department.

Attempts to contact Darien or Eiswert for comment were not successful.

At 2:30 a.m. Friday at high tide, B.C.’s orphaned orca whale calf, Kwee-sa-hay-is or Brave Little Hunter, swam past the sandbar her mother beached and died, under a bridge, down Little Espinosa Inlet, on to Esperanza near Zeballos.

The calf has been stuck in a shallow lagoon since March 23, when she and her mother swam through a narrow channel connected to the ocean.

When the tide went out, it left her mother who was pregnant, beached on the rocks. The mother died shortly thereafter.

A team of experts has spent weeks trying to coax the orca calf out of the lagoon and successfully fed it, but concerns were running high about how the two-year-old orca was going to leave.

“After most everyone had left to get some sleep the small group who remained stood as witnesses to watch her swim under the bridge and down the inlet,” a press release from the Ehattesaht First Nation said.

Google has been accused of "bundling" YouTube Music, their music streaming service, to their YouTube Premium users. The Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has been conducting an investigation into this matter for over a year.

According to Korean media outlet KBS, the deliberation process to determine sanctions is set to begin soon.

South Korean users who have subscribed to YouTube Premium, a service where users can watch YouTube videos without ads, for 14,900 KRW (~10.82 USD) a month were provided services to 'YouTube Music,' a music streaming service, without additional charges.

The number of YouTube Music users has rapidly increased, reaching up to 7 million people in Korea, even surpassing domestic companies (such as Melon) to become the number one streaming service in the Korean music market.

Since the service was launched, there have been consistent allegations of "bundling" services, and last February, the Korean FTC began its investigation. The core of the investigation is whether YouTube unfairly hindered the business activities of music streaming operators and restricted competition.

Three years later, Hasbro’s self-transforming, dancing, driving, talking, and attacking Optimus Prime finally has a villain to fight. Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, is about to arrive. For $1,200 — $899 through May 25th — its robot partner Robosen has created what could be the best auto-converting Transformer yet.

Just to make sure you’re getting it: this bot automatically transforms itself into a badass remote-control tank with a gigantic auto-extending cannon that can actually fire projectiles — then stands up and speaks over 270 phrases from original Megatron voice actor Frank Welker while doing all sorts of tricks.

Here, bask in the glory of childhood imagination become real:


Did I mention it responds to loads of voice commands, too?

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is coming back again — but it’s a bit different this time.

Warner Bros. and Fathom Events are teaming to rerelease the Oscar-winning fantasy blockbusters this summer.

The versions screened will be Jackson’s extended editions (so you might want get the jumbo tub of popcorn), and also the versions that the filmmaker remastered in 2020 for a 4K Ultra HD rerelease. This is the first time the remastered versions will be in theaters.

The films will screen across three days at Fathom Events participating chains, like AMC, Cinemark and Regal.

Throwflame, an Ohio-based flamethrower manufacturer, has released what it says is the first-ever robot dog with a flamethrower attached for remote firestarting.

The Thermonator is a robotic quadruped with the company’s ARC flamethrower mounted on its back. The robot dog features lidar mapping, first-person view (FPV) navigation, obstacle avoidance, and laser sighting to remotely deliver fire, with a 30-foot firing range and a one-hour battery life.

The company says the flamethrowing platform can be used for wildfire management, prescribed agricultural burns, snow and ice removal, or even entertainment special effects.

In a video released by Throwflame, the Thermonator can be seen navigating snowy landscapes, leaf-littered forests and grassy hills, by day and by night.

The highly advanced solar sail boom could one day allow spacecraft to travel without bulky rocket fuel.

NASA hitched a ride aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron Launcher in New Zealand yesterday evening, and is preparing to test a new, highly advanced solar sail design. Now in a sun-synchronous orbit roughly 600-miles above Earth, the agency’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) will in the coming weeks deploy and showcase technology that could one day power deep-space missions without the need for any actual rocket fuel, after launch.

The fundamentals behind solar sails aren’t in question. By capturing the pressure emitted by solar energy, thin sheets can propel a spacecraft at immense speeds, similar to a sailboat. Engineers have already demonstrated the principles before, but NASA’s new project will specifically showcase a promising boom design constructed of flexible composite polymer materials reinforced with carbon fiber.

Although delivered in a toaster-sized package, ACS3 will take less than 30 minutes to unfurl into an 860-square-foot sheet of ultrathin plastic anchored by its four accompanying 23-foot-long booms. These poles, once deployed, function as sailboat booms, and will keep the sheet taut enough to capture solar energy.

But what makes the ACS3 booms so special is how they are stored. Any solar sail’s boom system will need to remain stiff enough through harsh temperature fluctuations, as well as durable enough to last through lengthy mission durations. Scaled-up solar sails, however, will be pretty massive—NASA is currently planning future designs as large as 5,400-square-feet, or roughly the size of a basketball court. These sails will need extremely long boom systems that won’t necessarily fit in a rocket’s cargo hold.

True to his word, billionaire multi-company leader Elon Musk’s startup xAI today made its first large language model (LLM) Grok open source.

The move, which Musk had previously proclaimed would happen this week, now enables any other entrepreneur, programmer, company, or individual to take Grok’s weights — the strength of connections between the model’s artificial “neurons,” or software modules that allow the model to make decisions and accept inputs and provide outputs in the form of text — and other associated documentation and use a copy of the model for whatever they’d like, including for commercial applications.

“We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model,” the company announced in a blog post. “Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.”

Those interested can download the code for Grok on its Github page or via a torrent link. Hugging Face also added a fast download instance here.

The rape conviction of movie producer Harvey Weinstein has been overturned by New York's highest court.

The New York Court of Appeals, in a scathing 4-3 opinion, overturned Weinstein's conviction on sex crimes against three women, finding the trial judge "erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes."

The court said that testimony "served no material non-propensity purpose" and "portrayed defendant in a highly prejudicial light."

Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer told ABC News, "We are happily surprised and we are studying the ruling."

Major internet providers once again will have to abide by a set of robust rules of the road, prohibiting them from blocking or throttling traffic, as the FCC today reinstated net neutrality regulations.

The commission voted 3-2 along party lines to adopt the rules, which broadly prohibit Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other providers from favoring some types of internet traffic over others.

The latest net neutrality rules resemble those adopted in 2015, when the FCC voted to reclassify internet service like a common carrier, or the same regulatory designation given to phone service. The commission, with a majority of Democratic members, sought reclassification as a way to give the FCC the regulatory authority to establish significant net neutrality rules.

But less than three years later, after Donald Trump became president, a Republican-controlled FCC reversed net neutrality, to protest online and outside the FCC offices.

Dean Carter, the project lead on Fallout London, revealed in a short interview with the BBC that Bethesda gave their team of modders no warning before Fallout 4's next-gen update, which he says "has, for a lack of a better term, screwed us over."

Originally, the "DLC-sized" mod that promises to transport Fallout 4 players to post-nuke London chose April 23 for its release because it was a "day that would work well for us, it would be after the series had come out, and also, it had related to when the in-game start date is as well being St George's Day," Carter explains.

But things didn't go as planned. Fallout London was forced to push back its release date after Bethesda announced that a next-gen update for Fallout 4 would arrive on April 25. "I don't want to say 'suspect' because that makes it sound malicious. But if you were a big corporation and there was a fantastic [Fallout TV] series that just came out, you think you'd coalign it and have the big update ready on the same day the series comes out," Carter argues. "I don't think it's malicious, but it seems like a very arbitrary date for them to drop."

The Fallout 4 script extender will be what breaks after the next-gen update, so the Fallout London team will have to just wait and see what happens and then change the framework before making everything compatible. These problems are why Fallout London's release date got pushed back indefinitely.

Editor’s Note: The performer in this story spoke to KRQE News 13 over the phone, he said he was not hired for the prom but did not elaborate further.

Angry parents are wondering what school officials were thinking when they invited a provocative dancer to perform at the school’s prom. The video began circulating online this weekend and parents are demanding answers from school authorities. The performer, who was in drag, expressed anger and concern for his safety since the video began circulating.

Atrisco Heritage Academy High School’s senior prom was last Saturday at the Kiva Auditorium Convention Center and parents were shocked to see who was performing at the event. Parents told KRQE News 13 it was highly inappropriate.

“It’s just like ‘oh my God, can you believe this happened?”, ‘Wow here’s a video’, ‘wow that happened at prom?’, ‘wow, how disgusting’. Inappropriate,” said one mother.

A performer in drag was invited to perform at Atrisco Heritage Academy’s senior prom. Parents KRQE News 13 spoke to wanted to remain anonymous to protect their children’s identities.

DALLAS — American Airlines and Southwest Airlines both lost money in the first quarter, and Southwest said Thursday that it will limit hiring and close operations at four airports.

Southwest expects to end this year with 2,000 fewer employees than it had at the start of the year.

Airlines are dealing with higher labor costs and delays in getting new planes from Boeing, which is limiting their ability to add more flights at a time of high demand for travel.

American said it lost $312 million as labor costs rose 18%, or nearly $600 million. The airline said it expects to return to profitability in the second quarter — a busier time for travel — and post earnings between $1.15 and $1.45 per share. Analysts expect $1.15 per share, according to FactSet.

(CNN) - The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than century.

There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.

“We’ve certainly had larger declines in the past. But decline fits the general pattern,” said Dr. Brady Hamilton, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of the new report.

The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows.

The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it’s been for the past decade and a half.


We're finally starting to catch up to South Korea and Japan. In a few years, it will be our turn to have such a crisis on our hands.

The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back

When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”

She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.

Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”

That sentiment is echoed by Mondragón’s 70,000 other workers. Made up of 81 autonomous co-operatives, the corporation has grown since its creation in 1956 to become a leading force in the Basque economy. Eroski is one of its most conspicuous manifestations, with 1,645 outlets across Spain. In addition to food, the chain has profitable sidelines in white goods, electronics, insurance and holiday bookings.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Protesters chanted “Blood on your hands” at Tennessee House Republicans on Tuesday after they passed a bill that would allow some teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns on public school grounds, and bar parents and other teachers from knowing who was armed.

The 68-28 vote in favor of the bill sent it to Republican Gov. Bill Lee for consideration. If he signs it into law, it would be the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville.

Members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.

Four House Republicans and all Democrats opposed the bill, which the state Senate previously passed. The measure would bar disclosing which employees are carrying guns beyond school administrators and police, including to students’ parents and even other teachers. A principal, school district and law enforcement agency would have to agree to let staff carry guns.

In an effort to crack down on airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, the U.S. Department of Transportation has announced new regulations aimed at expanding consumer protections.

One of the final rules announced Wednesday requires airlines to show the full price of travel before passengers pay for their tickets. The other will force airlines to provide prompt cash refunds when flights are canceled or significantly changed.

"Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them - without having to ask," said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement announcing the new rules.

Surprise junk fees have become a large and growing source of revenue for airlines in recent years, according to the DOT.