Blaupunkt has launched the BH71 Moksha Hybrid ANC Headphones in India, setting a new standard in premium personal audio. The headphones feature India’s first 360° spatial audio with gyro head tracking, along with Moksha Hybrid True ANC and ultra-low latency performance. Designed for Indian consumers, the BH71 focuses on delivering advanced technology, immersive sound, and long-lasting comfort.
Noise cancellation on the Blaupunkt BH71 is powered by Moksha Hybrid True ANC, supported by a quad AI microphone array that continuously captures surrounding noise. Using intelligent real-time processing, the system reduces unwanted sounds to deliver a clearer and more immersive listening experience across varied environments such as busy streets, offices, and flights.
At the core of the headphones is a high-performance RTL audio chipset that enables spatial audio processing, gyro-based head tracking, and effective ANC. This ensures stable and consistent performance regardless of the listening scenario, helping maintain audio clarity and immersion even in challenging surroundings.
The BH71 is also optimised for gaming and content consumption, offering ultra-low latency of under 28ms. This feature helps maintain precise audio-visual synchronisation during fast-paced gameplay and video playback, making the headphones suitable for gamers and multimedia users alike.
Designed for comfort and portability, the headphones feature memory soft protein ear pads, a padded headband, durable metal structural elements, and a foldable design for extended use. The Blaupunkt BH71 Moksha Hybrid ANC Headphones will be available in India via Amazon, Flipkart, and the Blaupunkt India website at Rs 4,999.
“India is a key market for Blaupunkt,” said Sukhesh Madaan, CEO of Blaupunkt Audio India. “With the BH71 Moksha Hybrid ANC, we are bringing globally advanced audio technologies to Indian consumers who are ready for the next evolution in sound.”
“Married to Medicine” stars Quad Webb and Dr. Simone Whitmore have hit a stalemate in their friendship. Simone hasn’t been able to move past Quad’s comments about being closer to her “Sister Circle” coworkers.
Quad took issue with Simone pushing for Dr. Gregory Lunceford and his wife, Sweet Tea, joining the show. She felt like Simone only did so to be spiteful.
In the upcoming episode, Quad confronts Simone about telling Dr. Heavenly Kimes that she was looking up info on Quad’s car with a VIN.
Quad tells Simone, “The people said that you said if you could just find Quad’s VIN number, then I can find out whose name Quad’s car is in.”
She adds, “Why is it your business? Why do you want to know?”
Simone responds, “I’m not looking up VIN numbers.”
She continues, “I look up property and real estate.”
Quad asks once again, “But why do you want to know?”
In a confessional, Simone wonders why this had Quad so worked up.
“I can’t even believe Quad is all ****** up over a VIN number. ***** if it’s your car, and you driving it, roll into it.”
Quad becomes fed up with Simone’s responses, and Toya Bush-Harris steps in to keep her from getting violent.
In related news, Bravo has released the midseason trailer for the current season of “Married to Medicine.”
Quad’s patience will be tested again in a future episode. While the couples are sitting together, Curtis Berry gives his two cents on Quad and King’s baby journey.
“The complications that could be in the way of having a kid. You’re not married. In the Bible, that’s a no, no.”
When King and Quad discuss Curtis’ comment privately, King questions if Curtis is even the right messenger for that message.
“Is he a saint? Who is he to judge?”
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For many CEOs, the workday begins before sunrise. Leaders like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Disney’s Bob Iger have all said punishingly early mornings and rigid routines are their preference—and essential to running a global company. Life360 CEO Lauren Antonoff takes a different approach.
Rather than adhering to a tightly scripted daily schedule, Antonoff’s workdays are best described as “organic”—shaped less by the clock than by the flow of her month.
“I really think about my routine less in terms of what the morning tonight is, and really what the rhythm is over the course of a month,” she told Fortune.
On a typical day, that means starting work around 8:30 a.m.—a leisurely pace by some CEO standards. From there, her schedule is dictated largely by her first meeting of the day.
“Every day for me is very different,” she said. “I have probably a lot of meetings, but I try to also get time to read and reflect and communicate with people on my team.”
That flexibility, Antonoff noted, isn’t accidental—and wouldn’t have been possible without help at home. While she climbed the ladder to now lead a tech company with an over $7 billion market cap and took care of her household’s finances, her husband took the lead at home. Though he has worked as a real estate broker and entrepreneur, he was largely a full-time stay-at-home parent while their children were growing up.
Antonoff calls it a “1950s family structure in reverse.”
“Our children are now officially adults, but [my husband] did all the child care and all the cooking and cleaning and all of that stuff, and I do, the making the money and paying the taxes and that kind of stuff,” she added.
She encourages families—particularly working parents—to access what actually works for them, rather than defaulting to tradition.
“Giving yourself permission to depart from tradition can be incredibly freeing,” she said. “I feel incredibly lucky to have a career that supports our unusual arrangement, and an amazing husband who takes care of our family and me (and doesn’t make me do dishes).”
Forget work-life balance, Antonoff is a ‘workavert’
Not having an overly regimented work schedule doesn’t mean Antonoff isn’t putting in the time at work—if anything, it’s the opposite.
“I don’t have work-life [balance]—they’re not separate to me,” she said, adding that she describes herself not as an introvert or extrovert—but rather a “workavert,” meaning she is energized by the work grind.
Even when she’s off the clock, she finds ways to feed her curiosity about business, whether that means hearing about an interesting company or unpacking a problem raised by a family friend.
Antonoff isn’t alone. A number of high-profile business leaders have openly embraced work-centric lives.
For Emma Grede, the idea of work-life balance isn’t possible for those seeking wide-reaching success.
“If you are leading an extraordinary life to think that extraordinary effort wouldn’t be coupled to that somehow is crazy,” Grede told The Diary of a CEO podcast.
Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of the Fortune 500 financial services company TIAA, has repeatedly echoed this sentiment, calling work-life balance a “lie.”
Instead, she takes an active approach in dividing out her days to ensure she can effectively juggle responsibilities at home and in the office.
“The truth is I only have 100% of me, not 110%. Understanding that I am not 100% allocated to being a mom, they only get 30%, allows me to be more intentional,” Duckett told LinkedIn News in 2024. “So my children don’t get 100% of all of me. But within that allocation, they get 100%.”
Others take it even further. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to answer emails and is always thinking about work—even while washing dishes or watching a movie. He’s also said he never takes a day off, working seven days a week, including holidays.
NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 carrying the agency’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft, secured to the mobile launcher, begins the 4.2-mile journey toward Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026.
NASA officials are moving forward with a potential launch date in February for the manned Artemis II mission to the moon, though several criteria must be met in the next three weeks to do so.
“We have, I think, zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress [rehearsal],” Jared Isaacman, the newly confirmed NASA administrator, said during a Saturday news conference. “But look, that’s our first window, and if everything is tracking accordingly, I know the teams are prepared, I know the crews are prepared. We’ll take it.”
The four astronauts heading to the moon — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — stood next to Isaacman at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Looming in the distance behind them was the Artemis II spacecraft, slowly being transported from a vehicle assembly building to the launch pad.
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NASA will soon begin preparing for a “wet dress rehearsal.” That rehearsal will emulate the launch process, up to about 30 seconds until takeoff.
“We need to get through wet dress, we need to see what lessons that we learn as a result of that,” Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said. “And that will ultimately lay out our path toward launch. With a wet dress that is without significant issues, if everything goes to plan, then certainly there are opportunities within February that could be achievable.”
Artemis II has several potential launch windows, the earliest of which is Feb. 6. Launch attempts can also be made Feb. 7, 8, 10, and 11, before the next potential launch windows in March and April.
At a news conference on Friday, a reporter asked whether or not NASA leaders were in a rush to launch the Artemis II mission. Jeff Radigan, Artemis II’s lead flight director, said he took issue with the labeling of the mission as rushed.
“This is not a rush,” he said. “That’s not where we’re at right now. We are preparing to launch Artemis II. As Charlie mentioned, we’re working towards wet dress. … There’s a lot of preparation going on, but there absolutely are constraints.”
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MELBOURNE – Zeynep Sönmez rushed to the aid of an ailing ballkid in an interruption to play during her first-round upset win over No. 11 Ekaterina Alexandrova on Sunday at the Australian Open.
The 23-year-old Turkish qualifier was receiving serve in the ninth game of the second set when a ballkid wobbled, lost balance and stumbled backward near the umpire’s chair in sunny conditions at 1573 Arena.
The ballkid stood up quickly but started wobbling again, and Sönmez immediately held up her hand to suspend play. She went to the courtside and put an arm around the ballkid’s waist and helped her toward some shade.
Tournament officials moved quickly to help, but Sönmez had to lift the ballkid into a chair near the side of the arena. Medical staff took over to assess and treat the ballkid in the shade. It appeared to be a heat-related incident, with the temperature at the time around 29 Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) but with high intensity at surface level on the exposed hardcourt.
The players waited until the ballkid and the medical staff had left the arena and, after a delay of about seven minutes, continued the match.
Sönmez, ranked No. 112, broke serve in that game but lost the set before rallying to clinch it 7-5, 4-6, 6-4 to advance to the second round in Australia for the first time.
Her best performance in five previous Grand Slam events was a run to the third round at Wimbledon last year.
The tournament said the ballkid quickly recovered but didn’t participate in the remainder of the match.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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When he was a kid, Harry Reid seldom left the small town of Searchlight, Nevada, without his parents. But the summer after his brother Dale had graduated from high school, he invited young Harry to join him in Ash Fork, a tiny dot in Arizona along Highway 40. Dale had found work at a gas station in the railroad town near an Indian reservation. Not much was memorable about the town, the railroad, or the people Harry met, but he never forgot one lesson he learned there.
Dale’s girlfriend had a younger brother about a year older than Harry, and they spent the summer playing games together. Reid could easily outplay him but invariably lost anyway. “I never won a game,” he wrote decades later, “because as we got into the games, he would keep changing the rules.” He resolved never to do the same himself. He would try to understand the rules and stick to them. “That is what I think life is all about,” he explained. “Don’t change the rules during the game.”
That resolution held for more than 50 years—until it cracked.
By the end of 2012, Reid was almost out of patience. The Senate majority leader had been frustrated, then infuriated, by what he saw as the tyranny of the minority, which was racking up filibuster after filibuster on President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees.
Less than a decade before, Reid had been on the other side of the issue. In 2005, he had led a Democratic minority in using the filibuster to block 10 Republican nominees for appellate courts, prompting Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist to consider invoking the so-called nuclear option. Frist had wanted to remove the filibuster, which required a supermajority of 60 votes to overcome in the Senate, for most judicial nominees, so that they could receive a straightforward up-or-down vote requiring only a simple majority of 51 senators. Reid had successfully rallied senators in defense of the filibuster, and Frist had backed down. “The nuclear option is gone for our lifetime,” Reid had triumphantly declared.
But now Democrats were in the majority, and Republicans were discovering new virtues in the filibuster. In August 2012, Republican Senators Roger Wicker and Lindsey Graham wrote Reid “to express our concern regarding your recent remarks suggesting major changes to the rules of the Senate—changes that would severely compromise the rights of the minority.” The Republicans reminded Reid of his 2005 stance.
By the beginning of 2013, according to those who knew his thinking at the time, Reid was already prepared to end the filibuster for lower-court nominations. Then Obama nominated former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his secretary of defense. For the first time, the Senate filibustered a secretary of defense, and Reid had had enough.
“I think he basically came into 2013 ready to go there and just get the votes,” Adam Jentleson, Reid’s former deputy chief of staff, told me. “So I think you can probably find some statements from him during the course of the year that there were no plans. But I think his own mind was made up, and there were a lot of squishy votes.”
It was more than the historic nature of the Hagel filibuster that catalyzed Reid to limit the filibuster, Jentleson said; Republicans also blocked Obama sub-Cabinet posts and judges for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The National Labor Relations Board, a crucial body for unions, could not even get a quorum. Reid defended his action by saying that rules had been changed plenty of times, and he was downplaying what a watershed this could be. He knew it, and the majority leader also firmly believed that the future of the Obama presidency was at stake.
Reid chafed at any criticism that he was being hypocritical, denying that the only difference between 2013 and 2005 was the party in power. He insisted that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had made it his mission to thwart Obama at every turn and had changed the norms of the Senate. He also put his change of position in the context of his evolution on other issues, including abortion, immigration, gun control, and gay rights. It was not situational, he argued; it was a sign of maturity.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. John Lewis, R-Ga., during a “Rally to Stop the Partisan Power Grab” in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Scott J. Ferrell / Congressional Quarterly / Getty)
Reid knew that corralling the votes inside the caucus might be difficult. “There were half a dozen members that didn’t want to vote,” Reid’s No. 2, Dick Durbin, later told me. “They felt it was the wrong decision. I think it was a terrible choice: either keep with the McConnell way of stopping these judges through the filibuster or changing the rules of the Senate in a way that would have a profound impact.”
Obama, for his part, did not actively engage with senators. But he understood where Reid was coming from. “I think that Harry was an institutionalist and had great respect for the Senate traditions,” Obama told me in 2022. “By that point, he had witnessed—we had all witnessed—a level of obstruction when it came to judicial nominations that we had never seen before. What had begun as selected instances of highly controversial Supreme Court justices being blocked was now a circumstance in which, just routinely, they were just going to prevent a Democratic administration from filling vacancies and on the federal bench. And McConnell was very explicit about the strategy. He didn’t need a rationale; it no longer required that somehow.”
Reid knew he didn’t have the votes in the caucus, that he would have to, in the words of one of his staffers, “lead them all to water on it.” He slowly and methodically built the case that Obama’s judges would never be confirmed if a supermajority vote was required. “I had to be talked into it,” Senator Patty Murray, a member of his leadership team, told me. “I had to really think about what the process was and what it would mean. And he’d reached his conclusion long before he talked me into it.” Murray said Reid was able to persuade her and others to make the change “by sharing his frustration. And he was passionate about this, and the need to fill the courts and fulfill our responsibilities.”
As Reid lobbied his reluctant caucus members, he would seek counsel from the man he replaced, Tom Daschle: “I can’t tell you the number of times he lamented how broken the Senate had become and would say to me what he said to me on countless occasions, ‘Tom, it’s nothing like when you were here, when we were there together,’” he told me. In Reid’s autobiography, The Good Fight, he had railed against the Republicans talking about invoking the nuclear option in 2005. He’d discussed the book in 2008 with Daschle on C-SPAN. “What the Republicans came up with was a way to change our country forever,” Reid had said. “They made a decision that if they didn’t get every judge they wanted, then they were going to make the Senate just like the House of Representatives.”
Filibusters had increased geometrically since that conversation, but Reid had also made the timeless “senatorial saucer” argument to Daschle—that is, the House, heated by the passions of the people, would see its legislation tamped down by the more deliberate Senate. He’d concluded that section of the conversation with his friend by saying he believed that invoking the nuclear option “would ruin the country.”
Yet here he was, five years later, with California’s Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, the last holdouts, ready to do what he had said would be the ruination of America. On November 21, knowing he had the votes, Reid invoked the nuclear option for all presidential nominees except prospective Supreme Court justices, and it passed 52–48. Three Democrats voted against the rules change—Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas—but Reid had wiggle room.
Republicans, led by McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, claimed that the Democrats were trying to distract from the poor rollout and tanking approval numbers of the Affordable Care Act, and promised that the filibuster vote would come home to roost at the ballot box the next year. After the vote, Reid was elated, while another member of his leadership team, Chuck Schumer, seemed saddened. Schumer and Reid had talked for hours about the scheme, but Schumer was a reluctant yes vote—or so he would say later.
After the vote and unbeknownst to Reid, Faiz Shakir, a top aide who functioned as his bridge to the left, had gathered dozens of progressives into a room in the Capitol to celebrate. Many of those were special interests Reid and his team had harnessed to pressure his colleagues: union activists upset that the NLRB had been stymied, Common Cause members, MoveOn.org folks. When Reid entered the room, it thundered with applause. (Several Reid staffers believed if he could have rounded up the votes to end the filibuster for legislation, he would have done that, too.) Reid, who rarely second-guessed himself, understood at the time that the partisan winds would eventually shift. “I didn’t look that far ahead,” he later told me. “I knew that I wanted to get this done at this time. It was something that was important for the body. I’d worry about the future at a later time.”
Shakir told me Reid considered what might happen in a different scenario, but the discussions generally didn’t last long for one reason: “Let’s not be naive. I think he felt that Hillary Clinton would likely be the next president of the United States.”
In January 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president. It took McConnell only three months to invoke the nuclear option for confirming Supreme Court justices. By the end of Trump’s first term, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh had each been confirmed by narrow majorities. Many on the left blamed Reid for enabling the change; many on the right gleefully thanked him because Trump was able to appoint three high-court members. Reid said none of that trolling bothered him, and others said McConnell did not need a precedent to do what he did, that he was just waiting for a Republican Senate and White House occupant.
Reid continued to insist that he had no regrets for the move. Almost exactly two years after McConnell changed the rule to include high-court justices, Reid published an op-ed in The New York Times saying that the filibuster had become an anachronism and needed to be abolished because the Senate had “become an unworkable legislative graveyard.”
Reid seemed to truly believe, despite the partisanship that suffused the column, that the Senate had been badly damaged. But he was alternately bemused and furious as Democratic senators, some of whom voted for the 2013 change, expressed buyer’s remorse. “A couple of Democratic senators today have very short memories because they have stated publicly on the record that they wish that we had not changed the rules,” Reid said before he died. “That’s the dumbest damn thing. They were there. They voted for it. Now to come back and try to rewrite history is impossible.”
When we spoke, the Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, a onetime Democrat and one of Reid’s closest friends in Congress, chuckled about Reid being in high dudgeon. Shelby said he believes that Reid, if similarly situated, would have done just what McConnell did to enhance the prospects of remaking the Supreme Court. “If you’ve already broken the glass, why not?” Shelby said wryly.
Schumer, Reid’s close friend and ally, had an I-told-you-so moment shortly before Reid’s death about the 2013 maneuver. “I told him I thought it was a bad idea, but he was just so fed up and so pissed off,” Schumer told me. “I did get him to make sure that we didn’t go nuclear on Supreme Court judges. And look what happened … McConnell came in and got rid of the role right away. But yes, I thought going nuclear would have bad consequences for us. And on that one, I may have been right.”
A$AP Rocky was the musical guest on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, debuting songs from his new album Don’t Be Dumb. He opened with ‘Punk Rocky’ before delivering a medley of ‘Helicopter’ and the title track. Finn Wolfhard hosted the episode, and though his Stranger Things co-star Winona Ryder, who stars in the ‘Punk Rocky’ video, did not make an appearance, some of the other artists in the clip, including Thundercat, Danny Elfman, and Mark Harley, did show up. Watch it happen below.
During the episode, Sabrina Carpenter reprised her role as a 12-year-old boy on the Snackhomiez podcast, in a sketch that also featured Rocky. Next week, Geese will be making their musical guest debut on SNL.
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On Monday, communities will gather to honor the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. One of the country’s biggest events will take place in San Antonio, where upwards of 100,000 people each year march on the city’s east side.
Of course, San Antonio’s march for MLK did not start as an enormous event, that’s for sure. It began much smaller and quieter. But over the years, it’s evolved into the massive gathering it is today.
Arlington Callies, son of one of the march’s founders, joined the Standard to share more about its origins. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: The origins of this march trace back to your father, as I understand it, Reverend Raymond Aaron Callies, Sr. Could you tell us a little bit more about how this got started?
Arlington Callies: Absolutely. So the march originally started in 1968, a couple of days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and my dad… About nine, 10 of us… I was very, very young at the time. So about the only thing I really recall is a starting point, which is over at Lincoln Park, but nine, 10 of us marched.
The Hemisfair was opening that same year. So we marched in commemoration of MLKing. And once we arrived there, we laid a wreath honoring his life, as well as his legacy.
That’s when the original march got started. And then the early ’70s, my dad continued to march to draw awareness to some of the deficiencies on the east side of San Antonio, where the majority of people who lived there were Black or African American.
Some of these deficiencies – I apologize if this is a long answer – that we sometimes today take for granted, but we just didn’t have things like sidewalks or the drainage was poor, the lighting was poor, traffic lights were missing at intersections. And so that’s why we marched.
So, in a sense, the reason was to remember Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. But in a way, this took on a much larger significance for the community because it brought attention, and therefore people who had listened to the concerns of those marchers.
Absolutely. When we would march, it’s interesting, in the early ’70s – mid-70s late and then early ’80s – then the march started growing because people started joining in. They started seeing what we were fighting for, what we we’re trying to obtain, our purpose. And they would just walk out of the house and they’ll join us.
So we went from like, oh, nine to 10 people to 25. Next thing you know, there’s 50 of us and then there’s 100.
What was there a tipping point? Do you remember one year in particular where all of a sudden you sort of thought “wow, this isn’t what it used to be”?
Yes. Yes, there was. And that tipping point was dad wanted to have a life-size statue of Martin Luther King Jr. That was one of the things he wanted to accomplish. And it was probably his greatest accomplishment, because as I said, the intent was not to grow to march, but to have a life-size statue erected in San Antonio on the east side at the intersection of New Braunfels and Houston.
Now, at this intersection dad created, went to the city, and requested that particular intersection be known as the Martin Luther King Plaza. The city agreed to do that.
And then there’s this grass median where dad wanted to have the statue erected. The city agreed to that – said “hey, listen, Rev. Callies, think that’s a great idea. However, we just don’t have the money. As a matter of fact, we’ll take care of the base of the statue, but it’s up to you to come up with the remaining funds.
And at this time, that statue costs about $25,000, if I remember, so the city funded the first $10K. And then he took the youth, which was part of the Youth Leadership Conference for Community Progress, which was an organization that he started. And we stood out there primarily during the spring and the summer on Saturdays with this red coffee cans and he would distribute them to us and we would stand at all four of the intersections on the median and we will collect money and it took us about five years.
And then in 1982, that’s when the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled. And to answer your question, there were approximately 50,000 people there that day for the unveiling of the Martin Luther King statue.
But even after the statue was unveiled, this event kept growing and growing. Why do you think it’s grown so much? In fact, it’s now one of the biggest MLK events in the country. What do you that’s about?
Well, when Mayor Henry Cisneros saw what dad was doing, he said, you know what, Rev. Callies, we’re going to get you some help. And then he created, Mayor Henry Cisneros, the Martin Luther King Commission, where the first president or chairperson was Aaronetta Pierce.
And as a result of now having the Martin Luther King Commission getting the city involved where this created and generated more funding or revenue. And so now the march is going, we have police escorts, we have buses picking people up, the word is out, and it just took off.
As a matter of fact, when we started marching in the early ’70s, we started at a church called Trinity Baptist Church and the walk was only about maybe a mile and a half. And so we marched from Trinity Baptist Church, of course, to the Martin Luther King Plaza – about a mile and a half. Well, when my dad went to the city and requested a bridge, which is now, because he did a lot, the Martin Luther Kingdom Freedom Bridge, that was part of his idea as well.
I remember having the conversation with him and he said, “Arlington, I’m thinking about starting to march at the Martin Luther King Freedom Bridge.” I mean, we’re adding on an additional mile. And he said, “do you think that’d be too far for the marchers?” And I said, no.
And so then the march, now we’re marching from the Martin Luther King Freedom Bridge to the Martin Luther King Plaza. That was back then. But now we march to Pittman-Sullivan Park because the numbers were massive and we just outgrew the area where the statue is located.
Arlington, I hope you don’t mind me asking you a personal question. What happened to your dad? Is he still around?
No, no. Dad has gone to be with the Lord. He passed in 2011. Cancer.
So he got to see the incredible growth of this thing.
Oh yes. Yes, no doubt, he sure did.
How do you feel about how it had grown from being a small event that was very much community-minded into what it’s become? How do feel about that?
It’s very humbling, very honored. I do feel honored because the commission still recognized my dad as the origin or originator of the Martin Luther King march. I, like him, had no idea it’d grow to these numbers.
But yes, it’s very… I feel honored and it’s a very humbling experience.
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Hindi and Bengali have traditionally been the choice of languages for UI for the subcontinent, before vernaculars like Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc. It only makes sense; LLMs are trained to do the bidding in both the popular languages. While the local players have failed to make an impact (like their self-combusting scooters), global giants are leaving no stone unturned to expand their AIs with native linguistic capabilities.
In its bid to proliferate the desi demography, Elon Musk’s xAI is now looking for native speakers in Bengali and Hindi to train the in-house Grok AI. Training the machine with human oversight also gives much-needed proofing for AI chatbots, which has sincerely been lacking in previous iterations.
In his social media on X/Twitter, Ayush Jaiswal of xAI posted requirement for native language speakers to help mentor Grok
→ Russian
→ Arabic
→ Mandarin
→ Indonesian
→ Hindi
→ Bengali
Per the Tweet, it is not mandatory that the applicant be well-versed in training models; however, extraordinary proficiency in the language is mandatory. The goal?
Helping AI to learn our language better is a very fulfilling thing to do. We’re currently looking to onboard native speakers of the following languages:
Meanwhile, netizens took to the comments and lamented over the fact that Grok’s grip on their respective languages remained as shoddy as ever. One user asked,
Why not German? That’s my mother tongue; what a shame.
Another remarked, “You should apply the same approach to Hebrew. Grok performs poorly in Hebrew—it doesn’t comprehend what users write to it, and I can provide numerous examples to demonstrate this.”
The European Union will hold an emergency meeting of its ambassadors in Brussels on Sunday after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would hit eight member countries with tariffs until a deal is struck to allow the United States to purchase Greenland, a spokesperson for the Cyprus Presidency of the EU Council confirms to NBC News.
Members of the European Parliament and some American lawmakers were among the political leaders who expressed their opposition to the tariff threats Saturday, and to Trump’s goal of bringing the Danish territory under U.S. control.
“The measures against NATO allies announced today will not help in ensuring security in the Arctic,” wrote Roberta Metsola of Malta, who serves as president of the European Parliament, in a post on X. “They risk the opposite, emboldening our joint enemies and those who wish to destroy our common values and way of life.”
She added, “Greenland and Denmark have both made clear: Greenland is not for sale and its sovereignty and territorial integrity needs to be respected. No threat of tariffs can or will change that fact.”
Kaja Kallas of Estonia, the vice president of the European Commission and the EU’s chief diplomat, said that China and Russia “must be having a field day” with Trump’s announcement, saying they are the only ones who stand to gain from “divisions among Allies.”
“If Greenland’s security is at risk, we can address this inside NATO,” Kallas wrote on X. “Tariffs risk making Europe and the United States poorer and undermine our shared prosperity.”
“We also cannot let our dispute distract us from the our core task of helping to end Russia’s war against Ukraine,” she added.
Several European political leaders signaled a desire to halt final approval of an EU-U.S. trade deal that was reached last summer and already partly implemented, but which still requires passage in the European Parliament to become official.
Chief among them was Bernd Lange, the European Parliament’s longtime international trade committee chief.
“New US-Tariffs for several nations are unbelievable,” Lange wrote on X. “This is no way to treat partners. A new line has been crossed. Unacceptable.”
Trump, he said, is “using trade as an instrument of political coercion. The EU cannot simply move on to business as usual.” Lange called on the trade deal’s implementation process “to be suspended until US ends its threats.”
Manfred Weber, the German politician who heads the European People’s Party, said on X that the party was in favor of a EU-U.S. trade deal, but that following Trump’s threats, approval “is not possible at this stage.”
“The 0% tariffs on U.S. products must be put on hold,” wrote Weber.
European Parliament member Siegfried Muresan said on X Saturday that postponing a proposed trade deal between the U.S. and the EU was justified following Trump’s tariff announcement.
“STABILITY would have been the only gain from last year‘s trade deal between the US and the European Union,” Muresan wrote.
“Today’s announcement by President Trump to eventually impose new tariffs on several EU member states takes away that stability,” he added.
David van Weel, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, said his country had “taken note” of Trump’s tariff announcements.
“Military efforts related to exercises in Greenland are intended to contribute to security in the Arctic region. The Netherlands is in close contact with the @EU_Commission and partners on our response,” van Weel wrote.
A bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers met the leaders of Denmark and Greenland in Copenhagen Friday to reassure them of congressional support, despite President Trump’s threats to seize the Arctic island.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., co-chairs of the Senate NATO Observer Group, issued a statement from Copenhagen, Denmark, where a bipartisan congressional delegation was meeting with Danish officials in the hopes of improving relations after Trump’s repeated comments regarding Greenland.
“At a time when many Americans are already concerned about the cost of living, these tariffs would raise prices for both families and businesses. We urge the administration to turn off the threats and turn on diplomacy,” they said.
“The United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway are America’s closest allies. They are our NATO allies who have fought beside us, died alongside us and have made America safer and more prosperous,” they added.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Saturday that Democrats will introduce legislation to block Trump’s tariffs on European countries, “before they do further damage to the American economy and our allies in Europe.”
“Donald Trump’s foolhardy tariffs have already driven up prices and damaged our economy and now he is only making things worse,” Schumer wrote. “It is incredible that he wants to double down on the stupidity by imposing tariffs on our closest allies for his quixotic quest to takeover Greenland.”
The Senate has previously passed similar resolutions to rein in Trump’s tariffs with bipartisan support, as they only have a 51-vote threshold. However, should it pass in the Senate, this measure is very unlikely to be taken up in the House.
Brennan Leach contributed.
Great Job Raquel Coronell Uribe | NBC News and Steve Kopack | NBC News & the Team @ NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth for sharing this story.
