Author: i2wtc
ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Maritime Affairs Muhammad Junaid Anwar Chaudhry has announced the approval of Rs12 billion for transforming the Gadani Ship-Breaking Yard into a model green facility, aligning the maritime sector with international climate and environmental standards. According to an official statement released on Wednesday, while chairing a high-level meeting on the Gadani redevelopment, Chaudhry underscored the ship-breaking industry’s contribution to the economy and its potential role in the country’s climate resilience strategy. “Ship recycling must evolve to meet global sustainability standards. This transformation is essential to reduce pollution, manage hazardous waste responsibly, and contribute to a greener maritime…
Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025. Gerry Miller | CNBCSalesforce is accelerating its use of artificial intelligence in automating workloads, according to CEO Marc Benioff.”All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, noting that the technology currently accounts for about 30% to 50% of the company’s work.Technology companies are hunting for…
ISLAMABAD: Supreme Court Justice Mansoor Ali Shah on Wednesday turned away Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur, who sought the court’s intervention for a meeting with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) founder Imran Khan in Adiala Jail, telling him that he was knocking at the “wrong door”. Gandapur appeared in the court of Justice Shah along with senior PTI leader Advocate Latif Khosa and the K-P advocate general. Khosa requested the court to immediately hear the request for a meeting with the founder PTI because of the ongoing budget session of the provincial assembly. Gandapur said that the budget approval process…
Head coach Dusty May and players of the Michigan Wolverines celebrate after defeating the Wisconsin Badgers in the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament championship game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on March 16, 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Aaron J. Thornton | Getty ImagesGlobal payment company PayPal announced on Thursday that it has inked a deal with the Big Ten and Big 12 conferences to allow student-athletes to receive compensation through the fintech company’s platform.The announcement comes just weeks after a court settlement in the House v. NCAA case, which dramatically shifts the college sports landscape by allowing schools to compensate student-athletes for…
An aerial drone photo taken on April 29, 2024 shows a drone dropping a takeout at Anshang grassland in Hefei, east China’s Anhui Province.Once an obsolete airport, Luogang Park at the center of Hefei city now serves as the urban air transportation hub and a “super experimental field” for low-altitude economy, where services such as sightseeing by “air taxi” and drone takeout delivery are readily available at the visitors’ fingertips.In recent years, Hefei has been vigorously developing low-altitude economy and continuously enrich related consumption scenarios. It has launched over 100 low-altitude service routes including sightseeing, medical supplies delivery, takeout delivery,…
ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly on Wednesday completed the approval process for demands for grants pertaining to ministries, divisions and various federal departments. In total, the lower house of parliament, which met under the chairmanship of Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, approved 136 demands for grants amounting to Rs9,951.22 billion for 33 federal ministries and divisions. Meanwhile, over 750 cut motions moved by the opposition were rejected by majority vote. Finance Minister Senator Muhammad Aurangzeb, while winding up the debate, said that independent data validated by global rating agencies and reputable surveys shows a significant rise in consumer confidence, reaching its highest…
AI reasoning models were supposed to be the industry’s next leap, promising smarter systems able to tackle more complex problems and a path to superintelligence.The latest releases from the major players in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet and DeepSeek, have been models with reasoning capabilities. Those reasoning models can execute on tougher tasks by “thinking,” or breaking problems into logical steps and showing their work. Now, a string of recent research is calling that into question.In June, a team of Apple researchers released a white paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking,” which found that “state-of-the-art [large reasoning models] still fail…
An international cargo train of China-Laos Railway is pictured at Wangjiaying West Station in Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, on Jan. 2, 2025. (Xinhua/Hu Chao)KUNMING, June 26 (Xinhua) — The China-Laos Railway handled more than 2.48 million tonnes of import and export cargo valued at over 10 billion yuan (about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars) from January to May this year, customs data showed on Thursday.Both freight volume and value saw significant growth in this period, with a 7.9-percent year-on-year increase in volume and a 33.2-percent surge in value. In May alone, this railway transported 512,000 tonnes of goods worth 3.76…
RAWALPINDI: A spell of heavy rain early Wednesday morning broke the intense heat in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, bringing down temperatures and ending the humidity. The weather turned pleasant, and water levels in underground reservoirs and major dams, including Rawal and Khanpur, have improved. The Meteorological Department has forecast further rainfall, prompting the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) to declare a rain emergency. Due to the downpour, the water level in Nullah Leh rose to 12 feet. Water also entered low-lying areas, including parts of Murree Road. WASA teams, equipped with heavy machinery, were actively engaged in…
KARACHI: High-value transactions in Pakistan continue to rely significantly on paper-based and over-the-counter (OTC) methods, indicating issues of trust or accessibility in digital high-value channels. While 89% of Pakistan’s retail payments are now conducted through digital channels, they represent just 29% of the total transaction value — Rs48 trillion out of Rs164 trillion — according to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP)’s latest Payment Systems Quarterly Review. In stark contrast, OTC payments processed through bank branches and branchless banking agents, though only 11% by volume, account for a dominant 71% share in value. This disparity highlights a key challenge in…