Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The trees are now considered invasive, and their bark contributes to wildfire risk. In 2023, author and poet Victoria Chang watched as the massive eucalyptus tree across the street from her home in Los Angeles was cut down. As the men lopped off the tree's limbs, Chang realized she hadn't spent much time really looking at it. She reflected that the tree had probably taken years to grow and was so easily cut down in just a few days. Chang felt compelled to write poems about this feeling that would later evolve into her latest poetry collection, which asks what it means to be human in the face of nature.

At least 14 children were killed when the roof of a private tutoring centre collapsed outside Lahore, Pakistan. Officials said the unregistered centre was operating inside a residential building with an unsafe roof. Why is MAGA in meltdown over the Supreme Court birthright ruling? Supreme Court's divided ruling on birthright citizenship may be revisited Iran says it couldn't export a'single barrel of oil' during US blockade Mexican fans keep Ecuador's team awake before World Cup showdown

Musk labels Spain PM'tyrant' after Madrid proposes social media curbs Tech billionaire and owner of X, Elon Musk, has dubbed socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez a "tyrant and traitor to the people" of Spain for introducing new social media curbs for children under the age of 16. Musk's comments on Tuesday came in response to an announcement by the Spanish prime minister that Madrid would introduce new changes to the country's social media laws. Sanchez also confirmed that the government would work with the public prosecutor to investigate alleged legal infringements by platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Musk's own AI chatbot, Grok. "Dirty Sanchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain," Musk wrote in response to the Spanish prime minister's X post, in which he detailed the upcoming measures. Grok has come under fire for allowing users to create sexually explicit fake images of women and minors, triggering an investigation by the European Commission.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says children must be protected from the'failed state' of social media. Spain will join the growing list of countries banning access to social media for children, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez Tuesday. The law will apply to users under 16 years of age amidst a broader push to hold social media companies accountable for hate speech, social division and illegal content. He spoke to the importance of digital governance for these platforms, highlighting recent incidents like X's AI chatbot Grok sexualized images of children, and the myriad that have taken place on Facebook. In light of what Sanchez called the integral role social media plays in the lives of young users, he said the best way to help them is to take back control.

Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok's Strategy a Good Compromise? TikTok's new age-detection tech seems like a better solution than automatically banning youth accounts. But experts say it still requires social platforms to surveil users more closely. Governments worldwide are moving to limit children's access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements.

Identifying fine-grained book genres is essential for enhancing user experience through efficient discovery, personalized recommendations, and improved reader engagement. At the same time, it provides publishers and marketers with valuable insights into consumer preferences and emerging market trends. While traditional genre classification methods predominantly rely on textual reviews or content analysis, the integration of additional modalities, such as book covers, blurbs, and metadata, offers richer contextual cues. However, the effectiveness of such multi-modal systems is often hindered by incomplete, noisy, or missing data across modalities. To address this, we propose IMAGINE (Intelligent Multi-modal Adaptive Genre Identification NEtwork), a framework designed to leverage multi-modal data while remaining robust to missing or unreliable information. IMAGINE learns modality-specific feature representations and adaptively prioritizes the most informative sources available at inference time. It further employs a hierarchical classification strategy, grounded in a curated taxonomy of book genres, to capture inter-genre relationships and support multi-label assignments reflective of real-world literary diversity. A key strength of IMAGINE is its adaptability: it maintains high predictive performance even when one modality, such as text or image, is unavailable. We also curated a large-scale hierarchical dataset that structures book genres into multiple levels of granularity, allowing for a more comprehensive evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that IMAGINE outperformed strong baselines in various settings, with significant gains in scenarios involving incomplete modality-specific data.

Meta is adding new safeguards to its accounts for under-18 users by letting parents turn off their children's chats with AI characters. Meta is adding new safeguards to its accounts for under-18 users by letting parents turn off their children's chats with AI characters. Sat 18 Oct 2025 05.14 EDTLast modified on Sat 18 Oct 2025 05.34 EDT Parents will be able to block their children's interactions with Meta's AI character chatbots, as the tech company addresses concerns over inappropriate conversations. The social media company is adding new safeguards to its "teen accounts", which are a default setting for under-18 users, by letting parents turn off their children's chats with AI characters. These chatbots, which are created by users, are available on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta AI app.

This week has been an eventful one for America's public health agency. Two former leaders of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained why they suddenly departed in a Senate hearing. They also described how CDC employees are being instructed to turn their backs on scientific evidence. They painted a picture of a health agency in turmoil--and at risk of harming the people it is meant to serve. And, just hours afterwards, a panel of CDC advisers voted to stop recommending the MMRV vaccine for children under four. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter.

The vaccine advisory group ACIP, not all members of which seemed to know what the group does, recommended to the CDC that combined MMRV shots not be given before age 4. A federal vaccine advisory committee made of members hand-picked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommended in an 8-3 vote on Thursday that the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV) vaccine should not be given before age four, citing long-known evidence that shows a slightly increased risk for febrile seizures in that age group. Experts say that while frightening, febrile seizures--which are uncommon after vaccination--are usually short-lived and harmless, and removing the option for parents could cause a decline in immunization rates against measles, mumps, and rubella, some of the most dangerous childhood diseases. Known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, the group provides recommendations to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine usage. These recommendations are typically adopted by CDC and have an impact on state vaccine requirements for school, insurance coverage of vaccines, and pharmacy access--something at least one member of the panel seemed to be unaware of. Thursday's vote is part of a new shift in vaccine policy being spearheaded by Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist.

More than 2,000 people, including leading creative names such as Mark Haddon, Axel Scheffler, Benji Davies and Michael Rosen, have signed a letter published in the Observer today calling on the government to keep the legal safeguards that offer artists and writers the prospect of a sustainable income. John predicted the proposal "would devastate our creative community", while helping "powerful foreign technology companies". The signatories say they understand the government aim of boosting growth, but describe themselves as "staring in astonishment" at Whitehall's eagerness "to hastily wrap our live's work in attractive paper as a welcome gift to automated competitors". "Imagine asking ChatGPT to generate your child's artwork instead of asking the child. It's a horrible thought, isn't it?" said children's book author and illustrator Ged Adamson.