Orange Senqu river commission seeks to raise awareness to tackle climate change
Conceptual illustration of droughts and desertification in Africa.
POTCHEFSTROOM - Deputy Minister of water and sanitation, Sello Seitlholo has led a delegation to the ORASECOM Climate Resilient Investment Conference in Lesotho.
WATCH | Climate change | KZN plans to streamline disaster response
This comes amid a water crisis in various parts of the country largely due to failing infrastructure, pollution and increasing demand.
The conference aims to raise awareness and attract investment by promoting sustainable development and water security in the Orange-Senqu River Basin.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
9 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Orioles reinstate Cedric Mullins and Jordan Westburg from injured list
BALTIMORE (AP) — The Baltimore Orioles have reinstated center fielder Cedric Mullins and infielder Jordan Westburg from the 10-day injured list. Baltimore on Tuesday also optioned outfielder Heston Kjerstad to Triple-A Norfolk and designated infielder Emmanuel Rivera for assignment. Advertisement Mullins returns after being sidelined since May 28 with a strained right hamstring. He's batting .232 with 10 homers and 31 RBIs. Westburg has been out with a left hamstring strain since late April. He's batting .217 in 23 games. Kjerstad is hitting .192 with 45 strikeouts in 54 games. Rivera has a .232 batting average in 25 games. ___ AP MLB: The Associated Press
Yahoo
9 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Molly Gordon kidnaps Logan Lerman in ‘Oh, Hi!' trailer. Fans are still on her side.
The new movie Oh, Hi!, which just dropped a trailer that suggests that Misery really could have been a romantic comedy with the right approach. It's a classic tale: Girl meets boy. Boy invites girl on their first weekend away as a couple. Girl playfully ties boy to the bed … only for him to inform her, while he's still handcuffed, that he's actually not looking for a relationship right now. Naturally, girl never gets those handcuff keys, and boy remains tied to the bed. Yikes! Oh, Hi!, which debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, is directed by Sophie Brooks and co-written by The Bear's Molly Gordon. It stars Gordon as Iris, a girl who completely misinterpreted her situationship's intentions on their weekend getaway. Logan Lerman, meanwhile, plays the commitment-phobic Isaac, who Iris believed was her boyfriend. But Iris isn't an idiot: He took her on this trip! He made her scallops! If all that evidence wasn't proof the two were on the road to love, she's not sure what is. And with Isaac still handcuffed after their whole 'what are we?!' conversation went horribly awry, she has a plan: She'll do whatever she can to make him want to take the next step in their relationship — as long as he doesn't find a way to call the police first. While the movie doesn't exactly frame Iris as of sound mind here, people who watched the movie trailer really seem to get her plight. Sure, many people in the comments section on YouTube pointed to Iris's deranged behavior, which some said would have been interpreted much more negatively had the gender roles been reversed. However, others totally understood where Iris is coming from: 'The way that this made me feel valid for my situationship telling me he wasn't ready for a relationship after being super romantic with me and feeling like I was going insane,' one person wrote in the YouTube comments. Meanwhile, on TikTok, there were lots of Iris sympathizers. One called her reaction a 'rational response, [to be honest]' while another said that they 'support women's rights and wrongs' before adding, 'but idk she may be right.' 'Totally get where she's coming from,' one commenter declared, while another admitted, 'I'd crash out too if Logan Lerman said that to me.' 'Sending this to everyone i've ever had a situationship with thanks,' one joked, while another said they were just 'one more situationship' away from becoming Iris. It's a perspective Gordon and Brooks understand. In an interview with Deadline earlier this year, Gordon spoke about how the idea for the film came about after she and Brooks both went through breakups. 'We kind of wanted to make something about the communication breakdown of our generation,' Gordon explained. 'I mean, it's always been ridiculously hard to date, but we do feel like it might be the hardest that it's ever been, and we just wanted to kind of poke fun at all the funny experiences that we've had and our friends have had.' In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Brooks said of the film: 'I think a lot of things in our culture about women pursuing love and wanting love become desperate or sad or embarrassing, and it's romantic for a man to be pursuing love and wanting a partner, and it's sad and desperate for a woman to want it. I really push against that. Part of being a human is wanting connection and I think it was exciting for us to kind of lean into some tropes that we thought were funny and absurd. Molly and I talk about how this movie is — If we were 10% crazy, what would we do?' Whether Iris is 10% crazy or a bit larger of a percentage is up for audiences to decide, of course — and how she gets out of the situation with Isaac, ideally alive, is anyone's guess. Oh, Hi! hits theaters on July 25.
CNBC
9 minutes ago
- CNBC
OpenAI taps Google in unprecedented cloud deal despite AI rivalry, sources say: Reuters
OpenAI plans to add Alphabet'sGoogle cloud service to meet its growing needs for computing capacity, three sources told Reuters, marking a surprising collaboration between two prominent competitors in the artificial intelligence sector. The deal, which has been under discussion for a few months, was finalized in May, one of the sources added. It underscores how massive computing demands to train and deploy AI models are reshaping the competitive dynamics in AI, and marks OpenAI's latest move to diversify its compute sources beyond its major supporter Microsoft, including its high-profile Stargate data center project. It is a win for Google's cloud unit, which will supply additional computing capacity to OpenAI's existing infrastructure for training and running its AI models, sources said, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The move also comes as OpenAI's ChatGPT poses the biggest threat to Google's dominant search business in years, with Google executives recently saying that the AI race may not be winner-take-all. OpenAI, Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Alphabet's stock was up 2.1% on Tuesday afternoon following the news, while Microsoft shares were down 0.6%. Scotiabank analysts called the development "somewhat surprising" in a note on Tuesday, highlighting the growth opportunities for Google's Cloud unit, while expressing caution regarding competition from ChatGPT. "The deal ... underscores the fact that the two are willing to overlook heavy competition between them to meet the massive computing demands. Ultimately, we view this as a big win for Google's cloud unit, but ... there are continued worries that ChatGPT is becoming an incrementally larger threat to Google's search dominance," the analysts wrote. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, OpenAI has dealt with increasing demand for computing capacity - known in the industry as compute - for training large language models, as well as for running inference, which involves processing information so people can use these models. OpenAI said on Monday that its annualized revenue run rate surged to $10 billion as of June, positioning the company to hit its full-year target amid booming adoption of AI. Earlier this year, OpenAI partnered with SoftBank and Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure program, and signed deals worth billions with CoreWeave for more compute. It is on track this year to finalize the design of its first in-house chip that could reduce its dependency on external hardware providers, Reuters reported in February. The partnership with Google is the latest of several maneuvers made by OpenAI to reduce its dependency on Microsoft, whose Azure cloud service had served as the ChatGPT maker's exclusive data center infrastructure provider until January. Google and OpenAI discussed an arrangement for months but were previously blocked from signing a deal due to OpenAI's lock-in with Microsoft, a source told Reuters. Microsoft and OpenAI are also in negotiations to revise the terms of their multibillion-dollar investment, including the future equity stake Microsoft will hold in OpenAI. For Google, the deal comes as the tech giant is expanding external availability of its in-house chip known as tensor processing units, or TPUs, which were historically reserved for internal use. That helped Google win customers including Big Tech player Apple as well as startups like Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, two OpenAI competitors launched by former OpenAI leaders. Google's addition of OpenAI to its customer list shows how the tech giant has capitalized on its in-house AI technology from hardware to software to accelerate the growth of its cloud business. Google Cloud, whose $43 billion in sales comprised 12% of Alphabet's 2024 revenue, has positioned itself as a neutral arbiter of computing resources in an effort to outflank Amazon and Microsoft as the cloud provider of choice for a rising legion of AI startups whose heavy infrastructure demands generate costly bills. Alphabet faces market pressure to demonstrate financial returns on its AI-related capital expenditures, which are expected to hit $75 billion this year, while maintaining its bottom line against the threat of competing AI offerings, as well as antitrust enforcement. Google's DeepMind AI unit also competes directly with OpenAI and Anthropic in a race to develop the best models and integrate those advances into consumer applications. Selling computing power reduces Google's own supply of chips while bolstering capacity-constrained rivals. The OpenAI deal will further complicate how Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai allocates the capacity between the competing interests of Google's enterprise and consumer business segments. Google already lacked sufficient capacity to meet its cloud customers' demands as of the last quarter, Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi told analysts in April. Although ChatGPT holds a large lead over Google's competing chatbot in terms of monthly users and analysts have predicted it could reduce Google's dominant search market share, Pichai has brushed aside concerns that OpenAI will usurp Google's business dominance.
