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RNZ News
29-05-2025
- General
- RNZ News
'Mixed emotions': Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst not seeking re-election
Photo: SUPPLIED Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst has announced she will not seek re-election this year. The three-term mayor has led the council since 2017 and was a councillor before that, notching up 15 years of service. Hazlehurst said it was with "mixed emotions" that she decided it was time to hand over the chains. "I am honoured and privileged to have served our Heretaunga Hastings community as a councillor and mayor for the past 15 years," she said. "While my time as Hastings' mayor will end in October, I am excited to continue to serve our community in other ways." She said achievements during her term included investment in water infrastructure following the 2016 Havelock North campylobacter outbreak, tackling the housing crisis, revitalising the city centre, and building close relationships with mana whenua. "The introducing of our Takitimu Māori Ward was a highlight for me. Māori representation at the council table has made a huge impact on the well-being and cohesiveness of our community." But she said it had not always been easy. "Cyclone Gabrielle has had a devastating impact on our people's lives, their livelihoods and their property. "I am deeply grateful to everyone who has played a part in our ongoing recovery - rebuilding lives, reconnecting communities, and restoring vital infrastructure. Her term will end after local body elections in October. So far, current councillor Marcus Buddo has put his hat in the ring for the mayoralty, and fellow councillor Damon Harvey was strongly considering it.
Irish Examiner
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
GAA schedule has turned football v hurling into the new Blur v Oasis
For those of who were then in our impressionable teens, the summer of 1995 is a vivid period of nostalgia. There was no room for nuance in Blur vs Oasis. The bands were hardly members of a mutual admiration society and you followed suit. You either had a harrington or a cagoule jacket. You didn't have both. You were bourgeoisie or proletariat, a Jet or a Shark. Or, as Fr Damo so wonderfully articulated to Fr Dougal, 'Oasis or Blur?' A lot of adolescent angst was projected into Albarn v Gallagher. The antipathy came to a head in August that year when Blur brought forward the release of their single Country House to clash with Oasis's Roll With It. And as much as the front-lines were across the Irish Sea and there the victors would be decided, you tried to do your bit for the cause here. Your £10 pocket money was surrendered purchasing two whole singles. Jump forward 30 years and there are shades of that collision course in the GAA inter-county scene this weekend. Last Sunday week, the Ulster Council rescheduled their showpiece event from a 1.45pm start on Sunday to this Saturday evening, clashing with a Clare v Tipperary Munster SHC Round 3 game that had been set in stone since January. Ulster GAA did so to facilitate a final double-header with the Armagh and Donegal ladies providing the support act – they would have faced a morning throw-in otherwise – but matters in Ennis would hardly have crossed their minds never mind hurling. The province has two counties – Antrim and Down – in Division 1B next year and yet the Ulster hurling championship has not been played since 2017. The small ball game doesn't seem to be in the thoughts of enough GAA leaders right now. On Saturday, there will be 10 championship hurling game, three on Sunday. A couple of the Liam MacCarthy Cup teams have requested playing on the first day of weekend but that doesn't fully explain why almost the entire hurling programme has been shoehorned into one day. These, unfortunately are not isolated events. The weekend after next, 13 will be staged on Saturday and four on Sunday. Hurling's hurt has caused by its own hand too. Much like the Tailteann Cup does the Sam Maguire Cup, the Joe McDonagh Cup should run concurrently to the Liam MacCarthy Cup. Playing it like a blitz to feed into the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals is self-defeating and those two "last eight" games in the second week of June are an abomination. Excluding the outlier of Laois beating Dublin in 2019, the current average winning margin for McCarthy teams v McDonagh across nine preliminary quarter-final matches stands at 17 points. And we're still led to believe the best two McDonagh teams are more worthy of knock-out places in the MacCarthy Cup than the fourth-placed sides in Leinster and Munster. But like this weekend's fixtures clash, there is substance to hurling's suspicions that Croke Park sees it as the poorer relation to football. The decision to once again prioritise a secondary football competition, the Tailteann Cup semi-finals with a Sunday slot ahead of hurling's blue riband in the form of All-Ireland SHC quarter-finals hardly shows respect to the latter sport. Privately, assurances were given that it wouldn't happen again but this year's Saturday evening throw-in times are the compromise. In calling for hurling to breakaway from the GAA or pointing out a top level game shouldn't go behind a paywall, Babs Keating and Dónal Óg Cusack will be damned as zealots. But so long as the GAA sabotage itself, their voices will be heard. On Sunday week, the Kilkenny-Dublin Leinster SHC game will be show on GAA+ at the same time as RTÉ televises Tipperary v Waterford. For the GAA's media partners, there was an obvious reason why their broadcasts of games on the same day didn't overlap but there was a valid one for the GAA too. Why they now think developing their own broadcasting arm is an excuse to cannibalise is anyone's guess. In the end, Country House topped the charts with over 50,000 more unit sales, although their marketing had cleverly released a two-CD single version of their song, the second with a live version and a video. It didn't matter that the B-sides on Roll With It were excellent, Rockin' Chair a superior song to either of the band's respective singles. On Saturday, football will also win the battle. There will be about 8,000 more people in Clones than Ennis but the greater disparity will be in viewership. The Ulster SFC final will attract more eyeballs on RTÉ as opposed to the hurling clash being on a subscription streaming service. Oasis were champions in the long run. Their album (What's The Story) Morning Glory? spent 10 weeks at No 1 and has outsold Blur's The Great Escape by over 20 million worldwide. The Gallagher brothers always felt they were the better product. Hurling may think the same but the fundamental point from 1995 as it is now is in this phony war we really shouldn't have to choose.
South China Morning Post
10-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
How Alibaba's new RISC-V chip hits the mark for China's tech self-sufficiency drive
Advertisement The C930 will begin shipping to clients this month, according to Damo, without providing figures, at a the chip's launch on February 28 in Beijing. Its CPU design is available for licensing to integrated-circuit (IC) developers. 'The open-source model will help build an inclusive and collaborative global RISC-V ecosystem, making it the new engine for chip industry disruption,' Ni Guangnan, a Chinese Academy of Engineering academician, said at the event. Advertisement
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alibaba's research arm launches new RISC-V processor for high-performance computing
Damo Academy, Alibaba Group Holding's research arm, has launched its first server-grade central processing unit (CPU), marking a significant step in the tech giant's efforts to boost its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and counter US chip restrictions. The new chip, called C930, is the latest addition to Alibaba's XuanTie RISC-V processor series. Designed for server-level, high-performance computing, the C930 will begin shipping to clients in March, Damo announced at a conference in Beijing on Friday. The latest product, which is based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, highlights Alibaba's efforts in recent years to contribute to China's chip self-sufficiency drive. The Hangzhou-based company has been building an ecosystem around RISC-V amid heightened US export controls on advanced chips. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. A signboard for Alibaba research arm Damo Academy pictured at an exhibition. Photo: Weibo alt=A signboard for Alibaba research arm Damo Academy pictured at an exhibition. Photo: Weibo> The name RISC-V refers to the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a design philosophy for simplified architectures for CPUs. As an open-source project, it is free for anyone to use and modify, unlike competing standards such as Intel's x86, a complex instruction set that dominates personal computers, and Arm's eponymous proprietary RISC-inspired architecture, which dominates the smartphone market. Damo has previously launched several XuanTie processors based on RISC-V, including the C910 in 2019 and the C920 last year. At the Friday event, the academy emphasised its role in advancing RISC-V adoption in various high-end fields, noting that the XuanTie team has supported the implementation of more than 30 per cent of RISC-V high-performance processors. Damo also announced a development plan for new chips under the XuanTie series, including the C908X, R908A, and XL200. These chips are intended for scenarios including AI acceleration, automotive applications and high-speed interconnection, respectively. The launch of the new chips came days after the tech giant announced an aggressive investment plan of at least 380 billion yuan (US$52 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. The company, which is China's largest cloud provider, aims to meet surging demand for AI models fuelled by the recent popularity of the high-performance, low-cost models developed by Hangzhou-based start-up DeepSeek. The planned outlay, which exceeds Alibaba's total spending on AI infrastructure over the past decade, is expected to see the construction of more data centres and increased deployment of AI chips. Other Chinese chipmakers have also been developing high-performance RISC-V CPUs. Last month, a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government research organisation, announced that it would deliver its RISC-V-based XiangShan CPU this year. The team said earlier this month that it had adapted XiangShan to support DeepSeek-R1, the popular reasoning model released in late January. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
South China Morning Post
28-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba's research arm launches new RISC-V processor for high-performance computing
Damo Academy, Alibaba Group Holding 's research arm, has launched its first server-grade central processing unit (CPU), marking a significant step in the tech giant's efforts to boost its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and counter US chip restrictions. Advertisement The new chip, called C930, is the latest addition to Alibaba's XuanTie RISC-V processor series. Designed for server-level, high-performance computing, the C930 will begin shipping to clients in March, Damo announced at a conference in Beijing on Friday. The latest product, which is based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, highlights Alibaba's efforts in recent years to contribute to China's chip self-sufficiency drive. The Hangzhou-based company has been building an ecosystem around RISC-V amid heightened US export controls on advanced chips. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. A signboard for Alibaba research arm Damo Academy pictured at an exhibition. Photo: Weibo The name RISC-V refers to the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a design philosophy for simplified architectures for CPUs. As an open-source project, it is free for anyone to use and modify, unlike competing standards such as Intel's x86, a complex instruction set that dominates personal computers, and Arm's eponymous proprietary RISC-inspired architecture, which dominates the smartphone market. Damo has previously launched several XuanTie processors based on RISC-V, including the C910 in 2019 and the C920 last year. At the Friday event, the academy emphasised its role in advancing RISC-V adoption in various high-end fields, noting that the XuanTie team has supported the implementation of more than 30 per cent of RISC-V high-performance processors. Damo also announced a development plan for new chips under the XuanTie series, including the C908X, R908A, and XL200. These chips are intended for scenarios including AI acceleration, automotive applications and high-speed interconnection, respectively. Advertisement
