A Philippine-flagged tanker carrying 1.4 million litres of industrial fuel oil capsized and sank off Manila on Thursday, authorities said, as they sought to contain a spill stretching several kilometres. In February 2023, a fuel tanker carrying 800,000 litres of industrial fuel oil sank in waters off the central island of Mindoro.
The Nasdaq indexes tumbled more than 3% for the worst days since October 2022. The list of laggards was a who’s-who of AI technology darlings, led by semiconductor companies such as Nvidia Corp., Broadcom Inc. and Arm Holdings Plc. The selloff was triggered by a middle-of-the-road earnings report from Alphabet Inc. late Tuesday that featured a bloated capital expense.
Talks on U.S. arms supplies to Communist-ruled Vietnam have been under way for months, before major changes in Vietnamese leadership, which experts and analysts say should not significantly change the country's posture on foreign and economic affairs. The discussions show the United States' growing efforts to gain influence with Hanoi, nearly half a century after the end of the Vietnam War.
Meta, on Tuesday, launched its largest-ever open-source AI model Llama 3.1 405B, and claims to have closed the performance gap with top closed-source models such as Open AI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The latest iteration of Llama, which has 405 billion parameters, was trained on a massive 15 trillion tokens using 16,000 of Nvidia’s ultra-expensive H100 GPUs.
Israeli PM Netanyahu, in a speech to Congress, vowed "total victory" against Hamas in Gaza. He criticized American war opponents and highlighted U.S.-Israel ties. Protests, some violent, occurred outside the Capitol. Netanyahu didn’t address a potential cease-fire but stressed fighting until Hamas is defeated and hostages freed.
