Author: admin@primenews

Demand for Apple’s new iPhone 15 lineup is weaker in China than for last year’s models, according to analysts. Sales for the iPhone 15 are down 4.5% in China compared to iPhone 14 sales in the first two weeks after its launch, according to Counterpoint Research. Separately, Bloomberg reported on Monday financial firm Jefferies said iPhone 15 sales dropped by a double-digit percentage following strong customer demand for Huawei’s new Mate 60 smartphone line. Apple (AAPL) shares fell 0.08% following the reports. The reports come amid a floundering Chinese economy, a struggling housing market, and more competition among higher-end vendors in China, particularly from…

Chinese tech giant Baidu is officially taking on GPT-4. On Tuesday, the company unveiled ERNIE 4.0, the newest version of its artificial intelligence chatbot that it directly compared to the latest iteration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new ERNIE Bot “is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4,” Baidu’s billionaire CEO, Robin Li, told an audience at its annual flagship event. Speaking onstage, Li showed how the bot could generate a commercial for a car within minutes, solve complicated math problems and create a plot for a martial arts novel from scratch. The bot works mainly in Mandarin Chinese, its primary language. It…

Drugstore chains for decades saturated US cities, suburbs and small towns with new stores. Now, they are closing thousands of stores, leaving gaps in communities for medicines and essentials. Researchers find pharmacy closures lead to health risks such as older adults failing to take medication. Rite Aid, the third largest standalone pharmacy chain, filed for bankruptcy Sunday and will reportedly close roughly 400 to 500 of its approximately 2,200 stores. Rite Aid was undone by competition from larger rivals, its $3.3 billion debt load, and expensive legal battles for its alleged role in fueling the opioid crisis. It comes amid walkouts by Walgreens pharmacists and technicians around…

Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm has begun operating at full capacity, removing emissions from power supply. Seagreen, off the Angus coast, can generate enough electricity to power two-thirds of Scotland’s households. The £3bn project, comprising 114 giant turbines, has been more than a decade in the making. But operator SSE says the consenting time needs to be halved if there are to be enough turbines to meet the government’s climate change targets. The company says Seagreen will displace more than two million tonnes of CO2 each year, helping reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity. The array…

President Vladimir Putin has arrived in China, Russia’s most important ally, for a key trip that will seek to shore up an alliance against the West and celebrate ties between Beijing and Moscow. But how strong are relations between the two countries? The small city of Heihe sits along China’s border with Russia. Local tourists come here to peek into neighbouring Blagoveshchensk, just across the river, but there are not many of them. A tour boat sits idle on the water, pumping out happy-sounding Chinese songs in an attempt to attract customers, but with nobody buying tickets it doesn’t look…

Five men have been jailed for 12 years each in Nigeria after they were convicted of exhuming a human skull. They had planned to take it to a traditional doctor who said it was needed for rituals that would make them rich. The men pleaded guilty after being caught with the skull in a bag. The prosecutor told the court that the men had dug up a body buried three years earlier at a Muslim cemetery in the north-central Niger state. “They said the herbalist informed and promised all of them that they would share the wealth from the said…

Police in Brussels have shot dead the man who killed two Swedish nationals on Monday evening. Abdesalem Lassoued, 45, was shot in a café in the Schaerbeek neighbourhood. Two Swedes were killed and a third person injured in the automatic rifle attack on Monday. It took place on Boulevard d’Ypres, 5km (3 miles) from the stadium where Belgium was playing Sweden to qualify for the Euro 2024 football tournament. Brussels has been on its highest terror alert ever since. The gunman is believed to be a man of Tunisian origin who was in Belgium illegally, after having his asylum application…

Average pay growth rose above inflation for the first time in almost two years, in a sign that the squeeze on living costs may be starting to ease. Wages rose by 7.8% between June and August, according to official figures. It is higher than average inflation over the same three months, which measures the rate at which prices rise. The last time that pay growth overtook price increases was in October 2021, which was during the Covid pandemic. However, the rise in wages is an average and does not mean that cost of living pressures are subsiding for everyone. People…

LinkedIn owner Microsoft has announced a fresh round of job cuts, with around 670 roles set to go. The social network company says the jobs affected are across its engineering, talent and finance teams. It comes after LinkedIn axed 716 jobs in May and follows cuts at other big tech firms. “Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the firm wrote in a post on the LinkedIn website. The latest job cuts represent about 3% of the company’s workforce of 20,000 staff. LinkedIn makes its money through job ad listings and premium subscriptions and is used by…

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz may turn down his invitation to a major UK summit on artificial intelligence, the BBC understands. The government is hosting an event aimed at tech leaders, academics and political leaders to discuss AI safety on 1 November. The agenda will focus on specific future threats posed by the rapidly evolving tech, such as cyber security. Britain has mooted setting up a global AI watchdog to monitor developments. While no guest list has been published of an expected 100 participants, some within the sector say it’s unclear if the event will attract top leaders. A government source…