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CNN  —  Two bridges have collapsed in Russia’s western regions bordering Ukraine, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens, authorities said. It was not clear on Sunday morning whether the two incidents — which both involved trains — in neighboring Bryansk and Kursk were related, or what exactly caused the separate collapses. At least seven people were killed in Bryansk when a road bridge gave way onto a passenger train late Saturday, with railway authorities citing “illegal interference.” The bridge came down in the region’s Vygonichi district, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Ukrainian border, crushing the moving…

Russell Simmons has filed a lawsuit against HBO and the makers of the 2020 documentary “On the Record,” claiming defamation for their allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. The record executive, who’s seeking $20 million in damages, is also accusing them of ignoring or suppressing evidence from witnesses who “refuted and rebutted the accusations falsely made” against Simmons, according to lawsuit filed in New York. “Despite voluminous support for Mr. Simmons in the form of credible information, persuasive evidence, witness statements and calls for further investigation by notable members of the media, politics and the civil rights movement, the defendants simply…

Mayor Adams announced late Wednesday he will be instituting a 15 mph speed limit on e-bikes citywide amid growing concern over safety on New York’s streets. “I have heard, over and over again, from New Yorkers about how their safety — and the safety of their children — has been put at risk due to speeding e-bikes and e-scooters,” Adams said in a statement issued Wednesday evening, shortly after the Daily News reported the announcement was imminent. “Today, our administration is saying enough is enough: We are implementing a new 15-mile-per-hour speed limit for e-bikes and e-scooters that will make…

The Trump administration has launched a process to try to strip Columbia University of its accreditation over a finding the school had failed to meaningfully protect Jewish students from harassment. On Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Columbia’s accreditor, that the school was in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws and accordingly does not meet the commission’s standards. The government issued the finding May 22. “Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal anti-discrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” Education Secretary…

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is leaving the Democratic Party and promoting a new book expected to offer insight into her time serving under President Joe Biden. “Independent,” Jean-Pierre’s upcoming tome, vows to deliver a hard-hitting analysis of “America’s broken two-party system,” while urging readers to “embrace life as Independents,” the Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday. A description of “Independent” indicates Jean-Pierre elected to leave the Democratic Party — a decision she didn’t take “lightly” — after Biden dropped out of the presidential election and Trump returned to office. “She takes us through the three weeks that led…

It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. Earlier this week, AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,” writes Hugging Face in a blog post. “SmolVLA is not only a lightweight yet capable model, but also a method for training and evaluating generalist robotics [technologies].” SmolVLA is a part of Hugging…

A friend of Casandra “Cassie” Ventura testified in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday, alleging she was held over the edge of a Los Angeles high-rise by an unhinged Sean “Diddy” Combs. Bryana Bongolan, 33, a creative and marketing director, said the disturbing incident occurred in September 2016. She said she and a girlfriend were staying at Ventura’s place smoking marijuana and taking other drugs when the rap mogul turned up and began banging on the door. Bongolan said she sent her girlfriend to hide in the bathroom, where Ventura was, and then went out to the balcony. Bongolan, who said…

Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data for commercial purposes was unlawful, and alleges the AI startup violated Reddit’s user agreement. Reddit’s lawsuit makes it the first Big Tech company to legally challenge an AI model provider over its training data practices, joining a litany of publishers that have sued tech companies on similar grounds. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and…

“My wife taught me something,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. “Two things can be true at the same time,” he said. Siemiatkowski said it’s true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company’s revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years…

AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, the process a trained AI model uses to draw conclusions from new data, across a variety of different hardware options, according to a blog post on Brium’s bare-bones website. Cutting through that jargon a bit, Brium can help retrofit AI software to work with…