President Donald Trump criticizes 'Woke AI' and excessive state regulation while House Republican leaders consider including AI preemption language in defense legislation.

Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available application-specific model evaluation that caters to Africa's linguistic diversity. We present AfriSpeech-MultiBench, the first domain-specific evaluation suite for over 100 African English accents across 10+ countries and seven application domains: Finance, Legal, Medical, General dialogue, Call Center, Named Entities and Hallucination Robustness. We benchmark a diverse range of open, closed, unimodal ASR and multimodal LLM-based speech recognition systems using both spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech conversation drawn from various open African accented English speech datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals systematic variation: open-source ASR models excels in spontaneous speech contexts but degrades on noisy, non-native dialogue; multimodal LLMs are more accent-robust yet struggle with domain-specific named entities; proprietary models deliver high accuracy on clean speech but vary significantly by country and domain. Models fine-tuned on African English achieve competitive accuracy with lower latency, a practical advantage for deployment, hallucinations still remain a big problem for most SOTA models. By releasing this comprehensive benchmark, we empower practitioners and researchers to select voice technologies suited to African use-cases, fostering inclusive voice applications for underserved communities.

Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft's cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry. Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details. The announcement underscores the AI industry's insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker's biggest rivals. "We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we'll go to market together," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video.

Rap star Nicki Minaj is celebrated by a human rights lawyer for using her platform to bring attention to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

Trump braces for more Epstein fallout with House set to vote to release the files TODAY... what happens next?: Live updates The incredible new treatment that can cure liver cancer - without surgery, drugs or radiation. Roger had cirrhosis and thought he was going to die. Now he says: 'I'm so grateful' Cloudflare down live updates: Outage takes Claude, ChatGPT and thousands of other sites offline; 'Could you unblock me?' Trump brags of'Golden Age' at McDonald's event... but the grim reality threatens midterms wipeout North Korea executes'big shot' couple who became'arrogant' after the success of their business, accusing them of being'anti-republic' Movie icon'lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11', seduced her friend's 17-year-old son... but took a forbidden secret to her grave Trump is being utterly humiliated by a dead pedophile. MAGA and his legacy are collapsing. We're about to enter a blood pact with the devil.

Trump braces for more Epstein fallout with House set to vote to release the files TODAY... what happens next?: Live updates The incredible new treatment that can cure liver cancer - without surgery, drugs or radiation. Roger had cirrhosis and thought he was going to die. Now he says: 'I'm so grateful' Cloudflare down live updates: Outage takes Claude, ChatGPT and thousands of other sites offline; 'Could you unblock me?' Trump brags of'Golden Age' at McDonald's event... but the grim reality threatens midterms wipeout North Korea executes'big shot' couple who became'arrogant' after the success of their business, accusing them of being'anti-republic' Movie icon'lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11', seduced her friend's 17-year-old son... but took a forbidden secret to her grave Trump is being utterly humiliated by a dead pedophile. MAGA and his legacy are collapsing. We're about to enter a blood pact with the devil.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls the Warsaw-Lublin railway explosion an "unprecedented act of sabotage" as Poland accuses Russian intelligence of the attack.

Trump braces for more Epstein fallout with House set to vote to release the files TODAY... what happens next?: Live updates The incredible new treatment that can cure liver cancer - without surgery, drugs or radiation. Roger had cirrhosis and thought he was going to die. Now he says: 'I'm so grateful' Cloudflare down live updates: Outage takes Claude, ChatGPT and thousands of other sites offline; 'Could you unblock me?' Trump brags of'Golden Age' at McDonald's event... but the grim reality threatens midterms wipeout North Korea executes'big shot' couple who became'arrogant' after the success of their business, accusing them of being'anti-republic' Movie icon'lost her virginity to her stepfather at 11', seduced her friend's 17-year-old son... but took a forbidden secret to her grave Trump is being utterly humiliated by a dead pedophile. MAGA and his legacy are collapsing. We're about to enter a blood pact with the devil.

Stranger Things actress Sadie Sink will make her West End debut in a new production of Romeo & Juliet. British actor Noah Jupe, best known for his role in horror series A Quiet Place, will play the Romeo to her Juliet. They will portray the star-crossed lovers on stage at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London from March 2026, as first reported by US outlet Deadline. Award-winning writer and director Robert Icke, who has previously adapted George Orwell's 1984 and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, will direct the project. US actress Sadie, 23, rose to fame after joining the cast of Stranger Things in series two as as Max Mayfield.

This AI Grandma Is Going Viral. Is She the Future of Influencing? Granny Spills, an AI influencer, has amassed millions of followers on social media. Granny Spills, an AI influencer, has amassed millions of followers on social media. Over the past four months, millions of people have enjoyed the uproarious life advice dispensed by Granny Spills, an influencer wearing all-pink designer suits, on TikTok and Instagram.