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LAHORE: The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has withdrawn its decision to slash match fees for players participating in the National T20 Cup, which begins on Friday at the Iqbal Stadium, Faisalabad. The PCB had recently reduced match fees from Rs 40,000 to Rs 10,000 without any official announcement, drawing discontent from domestic cricketers. However, on Thursday, PCB chairman Mohsin Naqvi intervened, rejecting the decision and directing the board’s domestic cricket department to reassess the matter. While the PCB has yet to officially disclose the revised amount, sources indicate it has been set at Rs 30,000 per match — Rs 10,000…

These are the key developments on day 1,114 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.Here is the situation on Friday, March 14: Fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces have trapped the remaining Ukrainian soldiers still in the country’s western Kursk region, where Kyiv’s troops have clung on for more than seven months in one of the key battles of the war after making a daring cross-border incursion. Putin told a news conference that the situation in Kursk was “completely under our control, and the group that invaded our territory is in isolation”. Ukraine’s military leadership has denied their forces are…

LONDON (AP) — For lovers of beer, lagers and ciders, London has an answer that’s off the beaten track: The Bermondsey Beer Mile, a loose collection of brewery bars and liquor stores that stretches well over a mile through the streets and railway arches of south London. The attraction stretches from near Tower Bridge to parts of Bermondsey, a gentrifying area that just a few years ago would have been considered best to avoid. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, hundreds of beer connoisseurs descend on two dozen or so breweries to sample a wide range of craft beers, ales, stouts,…

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration’s recent changes to student loans are causing frustration and confusion for some borrowers. In response to a February court ruling that blocked some Biden-era programs, the Education Department has taken down online and paper applications for income-driven repayment plans. “This especially hurts anyone who’s lost their jobs, including federal workers,” said Natalia Abrams, founder and president of the Student Debt Crisis Center. “A few months ago, they would have been able to get on a zero-dollar income-driven repayment plan.”The removal of application materials also has caused confusion around the recertification process for borrowers…

Demonstrators have flooded the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, in a show of solidarity with student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States. Thursday’s protest is the latest in a string of demonstrations after immigration authorities arrested Khalil on Saturday evening. The administration of President Donald Trump has said it intends to deport Khalil, who is Palestinian and married to a US citizen, over his role in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Khalil’s lawyers and supporters, however, believe the Trump administration is wilfully conflating criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza with support for…

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quantization,” a technique for encoding audio into discrete tokens called codes. RVQ is used in a number of recent AI audio technologies, including Google’s SoundStream and…

LONDON (AP) — John Lennon is being honored in a specially minted British coin collection to mark the year the Beatles great and peace advocate would have turned 85, the Royal Mint said Friday.The coin, which will go on sale on Monday, features a portrait of Lennon that is based on a famous image taken by music industry photographer Bob Gruen in 1974.It depicts a side profile of Lennon, taken on the roof of his penthouse in New York. Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman in the city on Dec. 8, 1980 at the age of 40.Lennon’s name…

Is Elon Musk planning to use artificial intelligence to run the US government? That seems to be his plan, but experts say it is a “very bad idea”. Musk has fired tens of thousands of federal government employees through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and he reportedly requires the remaining workers to send the department a weekly email featuring five bullet points describing what they accomplished that week. Since that will no doubt flood DOGE with hundreds of thousands of these types of emails, Musk is relying on artificial intelligence to process responses and help determine who should remain…

Google, following on the heels of OpenAI, published a policy proposal in response to the Trump administration’s call for a national “AI Action Plan.” The tech giant endorsed weak copyright restrictions on AI training, as well as “balanced” export controls that “protect national security while enabling U.S. exports and global business operations.” “The U.S. needs to pursue an active international economic policy to advocate for American values and support AI innovation internationally,” Google wrote in the document. “For too long, AI policymaking has paid disproportionate attention to the risks, often ignoring the costs that misguided regulation can have on innovation,…

A recently disclosed zero-day affecting Edimax devices has been exploited in the wild since at least May 2024, according to CDN and cybersecurity solutions provider Akamai. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2025-1316, has been confirmed to impact Edimax IC-7100 IP cameras, but Akamai believes other Edimax IoT products may be impacted as well.  Its existence came to light on March 4, when CISA published an advisory suggesting active exploitation. Akamai confirmed for SecurityWeek a few days later that CVE-2025-1316 has indeed been exploited in the wild, by multiple Mirai-based botnets. The company, which has now released additional information on its findings,…