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Thames Water races to find cash as problems worsen
Investors are refusing to provide an expected first £500m by the end of this month.
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Switzerland wins Eurovision Song Contest 2024 By Reuters
By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen
MALMO, Sweden (Reuters) -Switzerland on Saturday won Eurovision 2024 in Swedish host city Malmo, beating runner-up Croatia, after having been among bookmakers’ top-three to win the competition.
Billed as a feel-good celebration of European diversity, this year’s contest has been thrust into the political spotlight with calls for Israel to be excluded over its military campaign in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ deadly attack on Oct. 7 in Israel.
Swiss rapper and singer Nemo, 24, won the contest with “The Code”, a drum-and-bass, opera, rap and rock song, about Nemo’s journey of self-discovery as a non-binary person.
“I want to say thank you so much, I hope this contest can live up to its promise and continue to stand for peace and dignity for every person in this world,” Nemo said, after receiving the Eurovision glass trophy on stage.
Croatia’s Baby Lasagna, real name Marko Purisic, 28, came second with “Rim Tim Tagi Dim”, a song about a young man who leaves home aspiring to become a “city boy” with better opportunities.
Israel’s Eden Golan, 20, finished fifth in the contest despite demonstrators’ calls for a boycott of the country.
The female solo artist on Thursday emerged as one of the leading contenders to win after qualifying for the final.
Booing was heard during Golan’s performance but also applause, a Reuters photographer in the auditorium said. The noise was partly audible in the broadcast viewed by tens of millions of people in Europe and around the world.
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There was also booing when the points of the Israeli jury were presented.
Several thousand protesters gathered in central Malmo ahead of Saturday’s final, waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Eurovision united by genocide” – a twist on the contest’s official slogan “United by music”.
A few hundred people later also protested outside the venue, chanting “Eurovision, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.”
Protesters have been pointing to double standards as the EBU banned Russia from Eurovision in 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine.
Police hauled away some protesters before surrounding and ushering them away, a Reuters reporter outside the arena said. Some protesters were seen lying on the ground after police used pepper spray to disband the demonstration.
25 countries competed in the final after Dutch artist Joost Klein was expelled earlier on Saturday due to a complaint filed by a production crew member.
Viewer votes made up half of Saturday’s final result, while juries of five music professionals in each participating country made up the other half.
The Eurovision winner is awarded the contest’s official glass trophy, which is shaped like a classic, old-fashioned microhphone, with sand blasted and painted details. The winner also gets to host the competition the following year.
Business
Musk’s Starlink satellites disrupted by major solar storm
This photograph taken on September 25, 2022, shows an antenna of the Starlink satellite-based broadband system donated by the US tech billionaire Elon Musk in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Yasuyoshi Chiba | AFP | Getty Images
Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, warned on Saturday of a “degraded service” as the Earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades.
Starlink owns around 60% of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and is a dominant player in satellite internet.
Musk said earlier in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the storm is the biggest since October 2003 and likely to persist over the weekend, posing risks to navigation systems, power grids, and satellite navigation, among other services.
The thousands of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer internet coverage around the world.
Business
Apple is finalizing a deal with OpenAI to put ChatGPT on the iPhone
Apple Inc. has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the startup’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence features to its devices, according to people familiar with the matter.
The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc.’s Google about licensing that company’s Gemini chatbot. Those discussions haven’t led to an agreement, but are ongoing.
An OpenAI accord would let Apple offer a popular chatbot as part of a flurry of new AI features that it’s planning to announce next month. Bloomberg reported in April that the discussions with OpenAI had intensified. Still, there’s no guarantee that an agreement will be announced imminently.
Representatives for Apple, OpenAI and Google declined to comment.
Apple plans to make a splash in the artificial intelligence world in June, when it holds its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. As part of the push, the company will run some of its upcoming artificial intelligence features via data centers equipped with its own in-house processors, Bloomberg has reported.
Last year, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said he personally uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT but added that there were “a number of issues that need to be sorted.” He promised that new AI features would come to Apple’s products on a “very thoughtful basis.”
On Apple’s earnings conference call last week, he argued that Apple would have an edge in AI.
“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software and services integration,” Cook said during the earnings call.
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