NASSAU, Bahamas — Justin Thomas was long off the tee and made a few long putts on the back nine to overtake Scottie Scheffler with a 6-under 66 and build a one-shot lead Saturday over golf's best player going into the final round of the Hero World Challenge. Thomas is trying out a 46-inch driver — a little more than an inch longer than normal — that he previously used for practice at home to gain speed and length. He blasted a 361-yard drive to 8 feet on the par-4 seventh hole and led the field in driving distance. But it was a few long putts that put him ahead of Scheffler, who had a 69. Thomas was on the verge of falling two shots behind when he made an 18-foot par putt on the par-3 12th hole. On the reachable par-4 14th, he was in a nasty spot in a sandy area and could only splash it out to nearly 50 feet. He made that one for a most unlikely birdie, while behind him Scheffler muffed a chip on the 13th hole and made his lone bogey of a windy day. Scheffler never caught up to him, missing birdie chances on the reachable 14th and the par-5 15th. Thomas hit his approach to 3 feet for birdie on the 16th after a 343-yard drive. Scheffler made an 18-foot birdie putt on the 16th to close within one. Scheffler missed birdie chances on the last two holes from the 10-foot and 15-foot range, while Thomas missed an 8-foot birdie attempt at the last. "I had a stretch at 13, 14, 15 where I felt like I lost a shot or two there, but outside of that I did a lot of really good things today," Scheffler said. Thomas hasn't won since the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills, and a victory at Albany Golf Club wouldn't count as an official win. But the two-time major champion has made steady progress toward getting his game back in order. "I'm driving it great. I've had a lot of confidence with it," Thomas said of his longer driver. "I feel like I've been able to put myself in some pretty good spots going into the green. I'm still not taking advantage of some of them as much as I would like, but that's golf and we're always going to say that." Thomas was at 17-under 199 and will be in the final group Sunday with Scheffler, who is trying to end his spectacular season with a ninth title. Tom Kim put himself in the mix, which he might not have imagined Thursday when he was 3 over through six holes of the holiday tournament. Kim got back in the game with a 65 on Friday, and then followed with 12 birdies for a 62. He had a shot at the course record — Rickie Fowler shot 61 in the final round when he won at Albany in 2017 — until Kim found a bunker and took two shots to reach the green in making a double bogey on the par-3 17th. Even so, he was only two shots behind. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley (68) was four back. "Feel like I've been seeing signs of improvement, which is what you want and that's all I can do," Thomas said. "I can't control everybody else or what's going on, I've just got to keep playing as good as I possibly can and hope that it's enough come Sunday." Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Moreover, the coach has emphasized the importance of improving the team's rebounding performance, as it is a crucial aspect of winning basketball games. Rebounding not only gives a team second-chance opportunities to score but also limits the opposition's scoring chances. By encouraging Liu Chuanxing to be more assertive on the boards, the coach hopes to see an increase in the team's overall rebounding numbers, which can lead to more possessions and ultimately more scoring opportunities.As cloud computing continues to play an increasingly central role in our digital lives, incidents like the one at the Alibaba Cloud data center underscore the need for continuous monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades of data center facilities. Ensuring the resilience and reliability of these centers is paramount to safeguarding the integrity and accessibility of the data they host.Auramarine and Quadrise join forces to support maritime decarbonisation
NYK plans to amalgamate two of its research and technical subsidiaries — Boltech Co., Ltd. and AMCO Engineering Corporation. Overview of New Company Corporate Name: Japan Field&Marine Engineering Co. Ltd (tentative) President: To be determined Amalgamation date: April 1, 2025 (scheduled) Shareholder: NYK 100% Business locations: Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kobe Purpose of Integration The core strategy of the NYK Group’s “Sail Green, Drive Transformations 2026” medium-term management plan is to deepen its existing core businesses and invest in new growth businesses. Based on this plan, the Group intends to commercialize the shipping business by developing and selling new technologies and services. This business integration is based on this plan’s core strategy. By integrating the technologies and expertise of both companies and expanding our sales base, NYK will be able to further strengthen and develop the group’s engineering business offshore and onshore. Paid-in capital: JPY 30 million Shareholder: NYK 100% Established: September 1966 President: Kazumasa Okazaki Location: Yokohama Paid-in capital: JPY 10 million Shareholder: NYK Trading Corporation 100% Established: September 2003 President: Yukitaka Nishimura Location: Nagasaki Source: Nippon Yusen KaishaEditorial: Surveillance cameras help police, but Virginia needs stricter regulation
The People’s Bank of China has spent much of 2024 locking horns with bond bulls. Yet when treasury yields dipped to record lows this week, officials stayed quiet. That’s in part because there’s less concern about rampant speculation, but also because the insatiable appetite for sovereign debt fits nicely with Beijing’s plan to sell more of it. That resets the bar for intervention. A dire economic outlook in the first half of the year helped fuel the bond rally. The yuan was testing its one-year low against the dollar while the benchmark CSI300 stock index .CSI300 dipped to a five-year nadir. Investors flocked to safe havens. But whenever the 10-year yield CN240011= dived towards 2%, the central bank would cry foul. It warned that smaller banks’ rising sovereign bond holdings were creating excessive risk, and even went as far as short-selling long-term government bonds to try to push yields up. The intervention did not cool the bond rally, though. Beijing’s stimulus package did. After the PBOC started implementing it in late September, yields rebounded and the CSI300 surged more than 30% within a month. Yet as reality sank in about how little the measures could meaningfully boost growth, capital started to find its way back to bonds from stocks. In the past two months, the yield on the 10-year benchmark dipped 20 basis points, hitting a record low this week. There’s less official fuss, though, because some key issues have changed. First, the bond funds and banks doing much of the buying now appear to be long-term bondholders, not speculators. More importantly, low yields work in Beijing’s favour. Citing sources, Caixin Globalreported the government is planning to raise at least 2 trillion yuan in each of the next three years to finance its stimulus measures. The lower the bond bulls drive yields, the less it will have to pay in interest on the new debt. It’s a tricky balancing act, though. Regulators are expected to meet later this month at the Central Economic Work Conference to map out plans for 2025. Investors will be looking for measures that support the stock and property markets as well as faster economic growth. If those don’t materialise, they’re likely to flock to the bond market as a safe haven. CITIC Securities 600030.SS is already projecting the benchmark yield to drop to as low as 1.6% next year. If investors’ economic doom-and-gloom scenarios are the driving force, Beijing is likely to intervene once again. The yield on China’s benchmark 10-year government bond dropped below 2% on Dec. 2 to hit its lowest point since records began in 2002. Using data from China Central Depository & Clearing, Reuters reported it’s only one of a handful of times that the yield has been below 2%. Source: Reuters Breakingviews (Editing by Antony Currie and Aditya Srivastav)In conclusion, the 3D World Low-Code Platform represents a paradigm shift in the world of application development. By combining cutting-edge 3D technology with a user-friendly low-code approach, the platform empowers businesses to create innovative, visually stunning applications without the need for extensive coding expertise. With its fully self-developed nature, robust security features, and scalability options, the platform is poised to revolutionize the way organizations approach software development. As we look towards the future, it is clear that the possibilities are endless in this three-dimensional world of limitless potential.
Willy Adames signs seven-year, $182 million contract with Giants in free agency bombshellWhether you are a seasoned gamer or a newbie looking to explore the world of mobile gaming, "Infinite Warmth" is sure to delight and inspire you. Join the adventure today and experience the magic of "Infinite Warmth" on your favorite platform, supported by the reliable infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud.WASHINGTON — If there’s a theme among President-elect Donald Trump’s health Cabinet picks, it’s this: The vast majority were critics of how the Biden administration handled COVID-19. The pandemic upended Americans’ perspective on public health and health care delivery, both throughout the United States and among Republican lawmakers. Policy experts say that change is evident in Trump’s selections to lead major U.S. health agencies. That change is particularly notable in Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has been critical of the federal government’s pandemic response. Trump and Republicans have praised Kennedy for bucking conventional thinking when it comes to public health, even though many of Kennedy’s theories and proposals are not backed by science. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy advocated against vaccinating kids against the coronavirus. He also led the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense beginning in 2018. As Trump’s presumptive HHS secretary nominee, Kennedy worked with the Trump team to pick the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Former Rep. Dave Weldon, Trump’s selection to head the CDC, is also a vaccine skeptic. Mehmet Oz, known more commonly as “Dr. Oz,” Trump’s choice to head CMS, promoted use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. FDA commissioner pick Marty Makary promoted herd immunity to stop the virus, as did Trump’s choice to lead the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya. Taken as a whole, the picks reflect a deep skepticism toward the recommendations of the very agencies these men have been tapped to lead. Trust in public health institutions plummeted in the wake of the pandemic, particularly among Republicans, according to polling, and virus prevention measures like wearing a face mask on an airplane or getting a routine vaccination have morphed into political actions in many parts of the United States. “There was a lot of misinformation, uncertain information,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said of the COVID-19 pandemic response. “In the end, when you looked at what the benefits were, the benefits were not as large as promised and some people were penalized. So I’m sure that’s reflected in [Trump’s] Cabinet choices.” But as Republicans cheer these changes to the public health sector, Democrats and medical institutions are concerned about health misinformation and how that could impact the American health care system, which spends roughly $4.5 trillion per year and accounts for 17.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. On the campaign trail, Trump won voters by promising to buck the system. But public health experts warn that moving too far from the medical establishment and rejecting scientific data could have disastrous consequences. A look at other key Trump health picks and their records on COVID-19: Mehmet Oz, CMS Oz has long been criticized for his controversial views on public health. The pandemic was no exception. The Daytime Emmy award winner served as an informal adviser during the first Trump administration, promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 early in the pandemic. He reportedly tried to persuade the president’s advisers to accelerate approval of the drug for use against COVID-19, even though at the time it had not been tested against the virus. Later, the FDA and infectious disease doctors found the antimalarial would not treat the virus. Oz also urged Trump administration officials to back a study he offered to fund at Columbia University Medical Center about the impacts of the antimalarial on COVID-19 patients, according to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In April 2020, Oz said on Fox News that reopening schools would be worth it, even if it led to increased deaths. He later retracted the statement. Marty Makary, FDA Like Kennedy, Makary has publicly questioned the broad use of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine mandates. But unlike Kennedy and many others in Trump’s health Cabinet, Makary was an early advocate of masking to prevent the spread of the virus and restricting air travel. The Johns Hopkins surgeon and author publicly opposed COVID-19 booster shots and promoted natural immunity over vaccinations. He went as far as arguing that the federal government censored pandemic data on natural immunity in an attempt to get more people vaccinated. But Makary also promoted early vaccination strategies to protect those most at risk for severe disease, such as getting single doses of vaccines to as many people as possible before allowing people to go back for a second dose of the shot. In late 2020, he criticized the FDA for not moving fast enough to approve mRNA vaccines. Jay Bhattacharya, NIH A Stanford physician and professor, Bhattacharya made a name for himself as a skeptic who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He also promoted herd immunity, the concept that low-risk people should live their lives normally and build up resistance to COVID-19 through infection while only high-risk individuals took precautions. In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the controversial “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter advocating against virus prevention measures with the hopes of quickly obtaining herd immunity. Both the World Health Organization and leading academic and public health organizations condemned the letter, with the American Public Health Association and other health organizations signing a letter calling it a “wrong-headed proposal masquerading as science” and arguing that the declaration would lead to preventable deaths. Dave Weldon, CDC Weldon, a physician who represented Florida in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 through 2009, has routinely questioned the links between vaccines and autism throughout his career. He does not specialize in infectious diseases and has never formally worked in public health, having spent his career as a military doctor, internist and politician. In 2007, Weldon introduced a bill that would remove vaccine safety research from the CDC’s domain and house it in a separate HHS agency. Although the bill didn’t advance, some privately worry it’s indicative of the way he’d strip down the public health agency. Former acting CDC Director Richard Besser said he’s concerned about Weldon’s lack of public health credentials and suspects he was nominated to the post largely because his vaccine skepticism aligns with Kennedy’s views. “What we’re seeing with a number of these nominations is a continuation of that politicization [of public health], where you know people coming in who are saying public health is the problem, not the solution,” Besser said.
In the midst of escalating tensions between China and the United States, it is crucial for both sides to engage in constructive dialogue and find common ground in order to prevent further escalation of the situation. The imposition of visa restrictions by the Chinese government should serve as a signal for the US to reevaluate its approach to the Hong Kong issue and to respect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.In conclusion, the OWL's call for new season expectations has sparked a variety of discussions and activities within the community, including the unexpected but delightful "Marvel Showdown" team building event. As fans eagerly await the start of the new season, they are finding creative and fun ways to come together and celebrate their shared passion for Overwatch and the Marvel universe. With the OWL community buzzing with excitement and anticipation, the stage is set for another unforgettable season of esports action.
Furthermore, the developers have also focused on optimizing the game for a smoother overall performance, ensuring that players can enjoy a seamless and lag-free gaming experience. From improved stability to enhanced graphics quality, the update aims to provide players with a more polished and enjoyable gameplay experience.
The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) and NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of the National University of Singapore (NUS), held the annual PIER71TM Great Circle 2024 today at the Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre. Dr Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment opened the event as the Guest-of-Honour which featured the 8th edition of the Smart Port Challenge (SPC) Grand Finals and a MarineTech Start-up Innovation Showcase. Over 400 participants attended the event, including local and international start-ups, venture capitalists, researchers, and members of the maritime community. Since its inception in 2018, PIER71TM has nurtured over 140 MarineTech start-ups, supported by a robust network of over 60 corporate partners. These start-ups have raised over S$80 million in investments from venture capitalists, with 10 start-ups raising close to S$17 million in 2024. Record Number of Maritime Innovation Proposals for Smart Port Challenge 2024 Smart Port Challenge goes global, with eight international roadshows held earlier this year in key maritime hubs across America, Asia, and Europe to expand its each to overseas start-ups. SPC2024 attracted a record number of close to 200 proposals from start-ups in 35 countries responding to the 14 challenge statements on key issues facing the global maritime industry. Twenty-eight start-ups were selected to join the 12-week PIER71TM Accelerate programme. This structured accelerator programme helps start-ups test and validate business model and go-to-market strategies for their proposed solutions, guided by mentors and industry domain experts. Twenty start-ups have secured 30 letters of intent for collaboration with Singapore-based companies, qualifying them for grants of up to S$100,000 for proof-of-concept or pilot projects with maritime companies and additional funding’ of up to S$250,000 for new product development through the MPA Maritime Innovation and Technology (MINT) Fund. A pre-event session also connected Smart Port Challenge finalists with potential funding partners. Three participating start-ups, Sweden-based Cetasol, Hong Kong S.A.R-based Clear Robotics, and South Korean-based Mapsea Corporation, have also established offices in Singapore as part of their regional expansion plan. Winners of Smart Port Challenge Grand Finals 2024 Clearbot, Open Ocean Robotics, and GT Wings emerged as the first, second and third placed winners respectively and Thiospark Energy received a Special Mention based on quality of innovation, market potential in Singapore and the region, industry relevance, and team experience. The judging panel comprised Mr Cyril Ducau, Chief Executive Officer, Eastern Pacific Shipping; Mr Teo Eng Dih, Chief Executive, MPA; and Associate Professor Chai Kah Hin, Associate Provost (Masters’ Programmes and Lifelong Education) and Vice Dean (Office of Graduate Programmes), College of Design and Engineering, NUS. For the first time, additional awards of S$10,000 were awarded to Mapsea for Artificial Intelligence (supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS)), GT Wings for Maritime Sustainability Innovation (supported by OCBC Bank) and Planys Technologies for Smart Port (supported by PSA Singapore). Mr Teo Eng Dih, Chief Executive, MPA, said, “We are glad that the Smart Port Challenge is supported by global partners across innovation hubs in America, Asia and Europe. With PIER71TM expanding its outreach, this will help grow the start-up enterprise and innovation ecosystem in Singapore serving the global maritime community. I congratulate this year’s finalists and winners and look forward to seeing their solutions come to fruition.” Professor Chen Tsuhan, Deputy President (Innovation and Enterprise), NUS, said, “PIER71TM has been evolving its programmes to stay ahead of the changing global maritime industry. By expanding our network of mentors, domain experts, and partners worldwide, we help start-ups gain better access to market validation and growth opportunities. We also value our strong partnership with MPA, our co-founding partner, as we continue to work together to drive research, innovation, talent development, and entrepreneurship across the maritime sector.” Ms Elsie Tan, Worldwide Public Sector Country Manager, AWS, said, “AWS is proud to be the Artificial Intelligence theme sponsor for the MPA Smart Port Challenge. This initiative brings together visionary thinkers and innovators to transform the maritime industry through cutting-edge technology. At AWS, we believe AI has the power to revolutionize port operations, drive efficiency, and foster sustainability. We’re excited to support the development of innovative solutions that will shape the future of the maritime sector.” Ms Angeline Teo, Head of Global Transportation, Global Corporate Banking, OCBC, said, “We are thrilled to sponsor this year’s Smart Port Challenge. This collaboration underscores OCBC’s commitment to driving maritime innovation globally and supporting our clients on their journey towards net-zero emissions. As the first Southeast Asian bank to adopt the Poseidon Principles—a global framework for assessing and disclosing the climate alignment of the shipping sector to promote its decarbonisation —we are excited to support the talented start-ups in the PIER71 cohort and industry partners to co-develop innovative decarbonisation solutions. Together, we can pave the way for greener oceans and transform maritime operations for generations to come.” Mr Alvin Foo, Head of PSA unboxed, Technology & Sustainability Solutions, PSA, said, “PSA is proud to support Smart Port Challenge 2024 as we believe that innovation is essential for transforming the future of port operations. Through the PSA Smart Port Prize, we aim to foster breakthrough solutions that elevate efficiency, sustainability, and resilience across the supply chain. This partnership underscores PSA’s commitment to collaborating with technology pioneers who can drive impactful change and prepare our industry for a more dynamic and sustainable future.” A recording of PIER71TM Great Circle 2024 will be available on the PIER71TM YouTube channel. Source: Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA)
