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NEW ZEALAND captain Mitchell Santner smiles during a press conference at the Gaddafi Stadium on Tuesday.—White Star LAHORE: Mitchell Santner, droopy-eyed with his hair a mess, yawned as soon as he sat down for his press conference at the Gaddafi Stadium on Tuesday. It’s been a quick turnaround between games for New Zealand and their skipper — two days on from playing their final group game against India in Dubai, here they were preparing for the Champions Trophy semi-final against South Africa on Wednesday. “It was actually probably more of a day’s sleep by the time we got here,” said…

SOUTH AFRICAN captain Temba Bavuma in action during a net practice session at the Gaddafi Stadium on Tuesday.—White Star LAHORE: South African captain Temba Bavuma hinted on Tuesday that the unnecessary trip to Dubai for his side could’ve been avoided, although he added there was little they could do with the Champions Trophy schedule having been made the way it was. Having clinched top spot in their section after winning the final Group ‘B’ match against England, South Africa had to travel to Dubai for the last Group ‘A’ match between New Zealand and India to see where they will…

LAHORE: After New Zealand’s pre-match press conference on Tuesday, the Gaddafi Stadium staff quickly got to work at changing the backdrop. Pakistan were holding a media briefing and having exited the Champions Trophy, this one couldn’t have the tournament branding. Pakistan had hoped to be here, in the semi-final of the first International Cricket Council tournament home soil in nearly three decades. “Lahore is my hometown so obviously there is a lot of regret,” Pakistan’s newly-appointed Twenty20 vice-captain Salman Ali Agha would tell reporters. “We didn’t play good cricket but we have to look ahead, move on in life.” After…

NHA TRANG, Vietnam (AP) — The gentle waves off the coast of central Vietnam’s Nha Trang obscure an open secret: The life-giving coral reefs below are dying. The waters are eerily devoid of fish. The bounty of the ocean is coming to an end.This is why Binh Van — who fished in these waters for over two decades — now charters his boat to Vietnamese tourists wanting to experience the thrill of fishing in the deep waters of the South China Sea. But there is only squid, which is flourishing in oceans warmed by climate change, to catch. His passengers…

The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to once again explain why his company ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product about a year ago in favor of its own homegrown AI system.  But this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasized that he doesn’t think others will — or should — follow his lead. “I don’t think it is the end of Salesforce; might be the opposite,” he wrote. The news that Klarna had developed its own in-house AI system based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT that allowed it to drop its contract for Salesforce CRM went viral in September. This came…

Amazon reportedly wants to get in on the AI “reasoning” model game. According to Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI model that incorporates advanced “reasoning” capabilities, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. The model may launch as soon as June under Amazon’s Nova brand, which the company introduced at its re:Invent developer conference last year. Reasoning models take a step-by-step, more considered approach to answering queries. This tends to boost their reliability in domains like math and science. The report says Amazon aims to adopt a “hybrid” reasoning architecture for its new model,…

While several of Google’s rivals, including OpenAI, have tweaked their AI chatbots to discuss politically sensitive subjects in recent months, Google appears to be embracing a more conservative approach. When asked to answer certain political questions, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, often says it “can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now,” TechCrunch’s testing found. Other chatbots, including Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Meta AI, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT consistently answered the same questions, according to TechCrunch’s tests. Google announced in March 2024 that Gemini wouldn’t answer election-related queries leading up to several elections taking place in the U.S., India, and…

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia House members voted 159-13 on Tuesday for a school safety bill that supporters say is aimed at preventing a school shooting like the one in September that killed two teachers and two students at Apalachee High School.But some lawmakers remain uneasy about its proposed creation of a statewide student database of disciplinary, mental health and law enforcement information to evaluate students who might commit violence. And although the House also passed a bill Tuesday to give a tax incentive to people who pay for gun storage devices or training, Democrats say the Republican-majority General Assembly isn’t…

United States President Donald Trump had set the motion to redesignate Yemen’s Houthis in January.The US has designated Yemen’s Houthi movement, known formally as Ansar Allah, as a “foreign terrorist” organisation, the US Department of State has said. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the department had restored the designation, which carries with it sanctions and penalties for anyone providing “material support” for the group. “The Houthis’ activities threaten the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade,” he said in a statement…

We still didn’t get a straight-up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to sidestep CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting everyone hates the former but is delighted by the “empathetic” responses AI agents can serve up. Given his new startup is building a customer service AI agent, you’d expect Taylor to be evangelical about the tech’s potential. And he did not disappoint: “I am more excited…