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WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation that aimed to bar transgender women and girls nationwide from participating in school athletic competitions designated for female athletes failed to advance Monday night in a divided Senate as Democrats stood united against an issue that Republicans leveraged in last year’s elections.A test vote on the bill failed to gain the 60 votes needed to advance in the chamber as senators stuck to party lines in a 51-45 vote tally.The bill sought to determine Title IX protections “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The vote came as Republicans have homed in…

Podcast recording and editing platform Podcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Thanks to the new model, the company is able to offer more than 450 AI voices that can narrate your text. The startup said that it developed the technology and model in such a way that its training and inference costs are low, giving it an advantage against competitors. With the move, Podcastle joins a number…

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — Dominicans on Monday celebrated Zoe Saldaña’s Oscar win for best supporting actress for her role in “Emilia Pérez,” marking a moment of immense national pride.Dominican President Luis Abinader took to X immediately after the actress received the award Sunday night, thanking her for being a worthy representative of Dominican culture.“I congratulate you, Zoe Saldaña, for becoming the first Dominican to win an Oscar,” he wrote. “Your talent and dedication exalt our nation, thank you for carrying our flag high. You are a Dominican pride,” Abinader said.Minister of Culture Roberto Ángel Salcedo, a former film…

Google Colab, Google’s cloud-based notebook tool for coding, data science, and AI, is gaining a new “AI agent” tool, Data Science Agent, to help Colab users quickly clean data, visualize trends, and get insights on their uploaded data sets. First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference early last year, Data Science Agent was initially launched as a stand-alone project. However, Google decided to integrate it into Colab with the goal of helping users access the agent directly from a Colab notebook, said Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, in an interview. Data Science Agent is available for free…

“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon’s VP of Artificial General Intelligence, on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He dismissed the idea that open source models might reduce compute needs and deflected when asked whether European companies would change their generative AI strategies in light of geopolitical tensions with the U.S. Sharma said onstage at the startup conference that Amazon was now deploying AI through its own foundational models across Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the robotics in its warehouses, and the Alexa consumer product, among…

The US government’s cybersecurity agency CISA says there is no change to its stance detecting and disrupting Russian APTs , even as a recent directive from the Trump administration pauses offensive cyber operations against Russia amid high-stakes negotiations. “There has been no change in our posture. Any reporting to the contrary is fake and undermines our national security,” the agency said in a post on the X social media platform.  The public clarification follows reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed a temporary halt to cyber and information operations against Moscow, a decision intended to keep negotiations on the…

Mexico’s president says country is ready for anything ahead of Tuesday deadline, as Canadian officials warn retaliation.A day before US President’s Donald Trump’s tariffs are expected to go into effect, Mexico and Canada say they have plans in place for how to respond. Trump is expected to decide on Monday what levels of tariffs he will impose early on Tuesday on Canada and Mexico amid last-minute negotiations over border security and efforts to halt the inflow of fentanyl opioids. Trump has vowed to impose 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico, with 10 percent for Canadian energy. Mexican President…

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who owned a New York City day care center where a toddler died after ingesting fentanyl has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty to federal drug charges.Grei Mendez, 37, dropped her head into her crossed arms in anguish as Judge Jed S. Rakoff announced the sentence that triggered sobs among Mendez’s family and the mother whose 22-month-old child, Nicholas Feliz-Dominici, died in September 2023.Rakoff had previously given the same sentence to Mendez’s husband, Felix Herrera-Garcia, after he pleaded guilty to drug charges and causing bodily harm related to the death.…

AI startup Anthropic on Monday announced it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The Series E, which also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, brings the company’s total raised to $18.2 billion, according to Crunchbase. “With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Anthropic is…

Ramp, a leading financial operations platform known for its all-in-one solution for corporate finance management, has secured $150m through a secondary share sale.The $150m secondary transaction was backed by prominent investors including Stripes, GIC, Avenir Growth, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, 137 Ventures, and Definition Capital. The deal values Ramp at approximately $13bn.Ramp, founded in 2019, provides a comprehensive platform designed to streamline financial operations for businesses. Its offering spans corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, procurement, travel booking, and treasury solutions — all aimed at eliminating inefficiency and financial waste. The platform has gained significant traction…