Public advised to meet outside Hamilton Police Station for online buy-and-sell exchanges, use busy well-lit areas, bring a friend, and report suspicious activity
Following another report this past weekend that a cell phone advertised for sale locally on Facebook Marketplace was stolen by an unknown potential buyer, after meeting up with an unsuspecting seller, the Bermuda Police Service (BPS) is once again urging the public to instead, consider conducting such transactions in relative safety, in front of the Hamilton Police Station.
It is anticipated that other police related locations will be announced, in due course.
There were no reported injuries regarding this latest incident and inquiries continue.
For those who choose to meet at locations other than outside Hamilton Police Station, please pick areas that are expected to have other people around, likely to be covered by CCTV cameras and that are familiar. In addition, the BPS continues to encourage prospective buyers and sellers to take note of the following advice.
Be Proactive & Stay Vigilant
Never go alone. Bring a relative or friend along and let other family members or friends know where and when the exchange is taking place.
Meet in well-lit, public areas before the hours of darkness. Avoid inviting an unknown individual to your home.
Take note of the vehicle used by the buyer or seller, including the colour, type and its licence plate.
Do not conduct transactions with anyone whose face is not fully visible.
If you feel unsafe at the public meeting spot, at any point, leave and contact the police immediately.
Report any suspicious activity right away by calling 211 or 911 in an emergency.
Online reports, for non-urgent situations, can be made via the BPS online community portal, https://portal.police.bm.
Every major movie event brings out the fashionistas – and the Sundance Film Festival is no exception. From Main Street to the red carpets, Sundance style is about individuality, warmth, creativity, and personal expression. It’s where filmmakers, artists, and creatives dress for the elements — and for themselves. Zina Edwards spoke to the people behind the best looks at this year’s event.
Nvidia remains dominant in chips for training large AI models, while inference has become a new front in the competition
International News via Reuters:
OpenAI is unsatisfied with some of Nvidia’s latest artificial intelligence chips, and it has sought alternatives since last year, eight sources familiar with the matter said, potentially complicating the relationship between the two highest-profile players in the AI boom.
The ChatGPT-maker’s shift in strategy, the details of which are first reported here, is over an increasing emphasis on chips used to perform specific elements of AI inference, the process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app responds to customer queries and requests. Nvidia remains dominant in chips for training large AI models, while inference has become a new front in the competition.
This decision by OpenAI and others to seek out alternatives in the inference chip market marks a significant test of Nvidia’s AI dominance and comes as the two companies are in investment talks.
In September, Nvidia said it intended to pour as much as $100 billion into OpenAI as part of a deal that gave the chipmaker a stake in the startup and gave OpenAI the cash it needed to buy the advanced chips.
The deal had been expected to close within weeks, Reuters reported. Instead, negotiations have dragged on for months. During that time, OpenAI has struck deals with AMD and others for GPUs built to rival Nvidia’s. But its shifting product road map also has changed the kind of computational resources it requires and bogged down talks with Nvidia, a person familiar with the matter said.
On Saturday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brushed off a report of tension with OpenAI, saying the idea was “nonsense” and that Nvidia planned a huge investment in OpenAI.
“Customers continue to choose NVIDIA for inference because we deliver the best performance and total cost of ownership at scale,” Nvidia said in a statement.
A spokesperson for OpenAI in a separate statement said the company relies on Nvidia to power the vast majority of its inference fleet and that Nvidia delivers the best performance per dollar for inference.
Seven sources said that OpenAI is not satisfied with the speed at which Nvidia’s hardware can spit out answers to ChatGPT users for specific types of problems such as software development and AI communicating with other software. It needs new hardware that would eventually provide about 10% of OpenAI’s inference computing needs in the future, one of the sources told Reuters.
The ChatGPT maker has discussed working with startups including Cerebras and Groq to provide chips for faster inference, two sources said. But Nvidia struck a $20-billion licensing deal with Groq that shut down OpenAI’s talks, one of the sources told Reuters.
Nvidia’s decision to snap up key talent at Groq looked like an effort to shore up a portfolio of technology to better compete in a rapidly changing AI industry, chip industry executives said. Nvidia, in a statement, said that Groq’s intellectual property was highly complementary to Nvidia’s product roadmap.
NVIDIA ALTERNATIVES
Nvidia’s graphics processing chips are well-suited for massive data crunching necessary to train large AI models like ChatGPT that have underpinned the explosive growth of AI globally to date. But AI advancements increasingly focus on using trained models for inference and reasoning, which could be a new, bigger stage of AI, inspiring OpenAI’s efforts.
The ChatGPT maker’s search for GPU alternatives since last year focused on companies building chips with large amounts of memory embedded in the same piece of silicon as the rest of the chip, called SRAM. Squishing as much costly SRAM as possible onto each chip can offer speed advantages for chatbots and other AI systems as they crunch requests from millions of users.
Inference requires more memory than training because the chip needs to spend relatively more time fetching data from memory than performing mathematical operations. Nvidia and AMD GPU technology relies on external memory, which adds processing time and slows how quickly users can interact with a chatbot.
Inside OpenAI, the issue became particularly visible in Codex, its product for creating computer code, which the company has been aggressively marketing, one of the sources added. OpenAI staff attributed some of Codex’s weakness to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware, one source said.
In a January 30 call with reporters, CEO Sam Altman said that customers using OpenAI’s coding models will “put a big premium on speed for coding work.”
One way OpenAI will meet that demand is through its recent deal with Cerebras, Altman said, adding that speed is less of an imperative for casual ChatGPT users.
Competing products such as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini benefit from deployments that rely more heavily on the chips Google made in-house, called tensor processing units, or TPUs, which are designed for the sort of calculations required for inference and can offer performance advantages over general-purpose AI chips like the Nvidia-designed GPUs.
NVIDIA ON THE MOVE
As OpenAI made clear its reservations about Nvidia technology, Nvidia approached companies working on SRAM-heavy chips, including Cerebras and Groq, about a potential acquisition, the people said. Cerebras declined and struck a commercial deal with OpenAI announced last month. Cerebras declined to comment.
Groq held talks with OpenAI for a deal to provide computing power and received investor interest to fund the company at a valuation of roughly $14 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions. Groq declined to comment.
But by December, Nvidia moved to license Groq’s tech in a non-exclusive all-cash deal, the sources said. Although the deal would allow other companies to license Groq’s technology, the company is now focusing on selling cloud-based software, as Nvidia hired away Groq’s chip designers.
Reporting by Max A. Cherney, Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li, Peter Henderson and Nick Zieminski
The wipeouts in both short and long bitcoin positions are far below the record $19 billion in crypto liquidations the market experienced after U.S. President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on China
International News via Reuters:
Bitcoin investors liquidated $2.56 billion in recent days, according to data provider CoinGlass, as cryptocurrencies slumped following a sell-off in other risk assets, including equities and precious metals.
The wipeouts in both short and long bitcoin positions are far below the record $19 billion in crypto liquidations the market experienced after U.S. President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on China. Even so, analysts say the fresh cascade of wipeouts demonstrates how sensitive the crypto market has become to risk-off sentiment.
While bitcoin is notoriously volatile, cryptocurrencies have been weighed down by fresh concerns about the AI trade and a sell-off in precious metals sparked by Trump’s announcement that he was picking Kevin Warsh as his Fed chair nominee.
“What we’ve seen the last few months is probably people taking a step back while they have to reassess their risk frameworks and how they operate in this market,” said Adam McCarthy, a senior research analyst at digital market data provider Kaiko.
Bitcoin fell as low as $104,782.88 during the October 10-11 period, after setting a fresh record high just days earlier above $126,000.
It has yet to regain those peaks, and was last trading at around $78,396, after falling more than 6% on Saturday. Thin weekend liquidity also exacerbated downward moves over the weekend, Bitfinex analysts said in a Monday research report.
“The biggest risk to prices at these levels have been outside forces — whether including a sharp rise in unemployment or deterioration of the AI trade,” said Jim Ferraioli, director of crypto research and strategy at Charles Schwab’s Schwab Center for Financial Research.
Markets encountered a barrage of news last week that weighed heavily on investor sentiment, including disappointing Microsoft earnings that raised concerns about AI spending. Microsoft on Wednesday reported revenue growth in its Azure cloud-computing business that was only slightly above expectations, sending shares down 10% the following day.
Markets also expect Warsh to lead a shift toward rate cuts alongside tighter balance‑sheet policy, which is seen as leaning more hawkish.
That announcement sparked a sharp sell-off in gold and silver prices on Friday, with silver recording its worst day ever and gold notching its steepest daily fall since 1983.
“Investors were looking for an excuse to lighten up and they finally got several,” said David Morrison, senior market analyst at Trade Nation.
Reporting by Hannah Lang in New York; editing by Michelle Price and Diane Craft
The budget talks have cost two prime ministers their jobs, unsettled debt markets and alarmed France’s European partners
International News via Reuters:
France finally got a 2026 budget on Monday, when two no-confidence motions failed, allowing the legislation to pass and heralding a period of relative stability for Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu’s weak minority government.
Budget negotiations have consumed the French political class for nearly two years, after President Emmanuel Macron’s 2024 snap election delivered a hung parliament just as a massive hole in public finances made belt-tightening more urgent.
The budget talks have cost two prime ministers their jobs, unsettled debt markets and alarmed France’s European partners.
However, Lecornu – whose chaotic two-stage nomination in October drew derision around the world – managed to secure the support of Socialist lawmakers through costly but targeted concessions, boosting his stature in the process.
“France finally has a budget. A budget that embraces clear choices and essential priorities. A budget that reins in public spending, which does not raise taxes for households and businesses,” Lecornu said in a post on X after the no-confidence votes, adding he was submitting the budget to the Constitutional Court to ensure it was compliant with the constitution.
Despite the still-elevated budget deficit of 5% of GDP seen by Lecornu, investors have taken heart in the new stability. The French government debt risk premium over the German benchmark has returned to levels last seen in June 2024, before Macron’s snap-election announcement.
Two votes of no-confidence triggered by the hard-left and far right fell short of getting a majority after the Socialists said they would not back them, which means the 2026 budget – already more than a month overdue – is now adopted.
The Socialists’ main scalp was the suspension of an unpopular pension reform, delaying the planned increase in the retirement age to 64 until after next year’s presidential election.
REFORMS ON PAUSE UNTIL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
With just over a year to go before the next presidential election in the spring of 2027, the respite on the budget front is giving Macron some breathing space, as he nears the end of his second term with historically low approval ratings.
Having lost control of the domestic agenda, his push for supply-side economic reforms has largely stalled. Meaningful spending cuts are unlikely before he leaves office, with lawmakers showing little appetite for unpopular measures as election campaigning intensifies.
Macron’s supporters say Lecornu, by showing flexibility and an ability to compromise, has prevented the return of wealth taxes and preserved Macron’s legacy of making France more attractive to foreign investors.
The president is now focusing almost entirely on foreign policy, pushing Europe to be less dependent on foreign powers, and advocating a harder line in confronting U.S. President Donald Trump over tariffs or the Greenland crisis.
At home, however, he leaves his centrist bloc without a clear successor and significantly weakened against a resurgent far right.
Two of Macron’s former prime ministers are gearing up for the presidential race, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, while Lecornu has also gained popularity over the past few months.
But should the centre remain fragmented, and with no primary planned, it remains uncertain whether a mainstream candidate will reach the election’s second round to face the far right, whether led by Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen.
Reporting by Michel RoseEditing by Ros Russell and Benoit Van Overstraeten
The Commission said in November it planned to restrict exports of scrap aluminium to stop the metal flooding out of the European Union and leaving its industry short
International News via Reuters:
A global recycling industry body on Monday said the European Commission’s proposed restrictions on scrap aluminium exports were unnecessary and risked undermining the circular economy.
The Commission said in November it planned to restrict exports of scrap aluminium to stop the metal flooding out of the European Union and leaving its industry short.
The move was welcomed by aluminium lobby European Aluminium, which urged policymakers to introduce export fees on the material.
However, the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling, which represents 37 national recycling federations, described the idea of an EU export ban or any trade restriction on aluminium scrap as “neither necessary nor effective”.
“The EU already generates more aluminium scrap than can be absorbed domestically,” the BIR said in its feedback to the EU’s public consultation on the matter, which was open until the end of January.
Available data “does not demonstrate structural ‘scrap leakage’ that would justify intervention”, it said. Scrap leakage refers to the loss of recyclable materials – a valuable and much lower-carbon resource than primary metal – to foreign markets.
Restricting exports would create oversupply in the EU, lower scrap prices and leave recyclers in an unsustainable economic position, the BIR said.
“This would ultimately reduce collection and recycling rates, increase the risk of unmanaged waste streams, and undermine the circular economy,” it added.
The Commission has said it will propose targeted measures for aluminium scrap by the second quarter of this year.
Diallo Rabain, Minister for the Cabinet Office & Digital Innovation, invited the OBA to talk about their bill and the overall matter of absentee voting, while expecting them to withdraw the bill. MP Robinson has said that the OBA were open to talks, but not at the cost of withdrawing the bill.
In December, the OBA’s absentee voting bill was pulled from the order paper before it could be debated. The reason given is that it would have required finances to be directed towards its implementation, and the Opposition cannot drive such decisions.
MP Robinson called it “political mischief” that the PLP’s was unwilling to collaborate on their bill in the two months since it was tabled.
Government hosted a number of Town Hall discussions on electoral reform in November through January – the final one having taken place last week.
OBA MP Robinson said the Town Halls offered “very little concrete information” on the plan for electoral reform, and “operated more like a brainstorming session with very vague answers”.
Following the final Town Hall session, Minister Rabain said the discussions had brought up some issues they had not considered, and cited the need for a careful approach to absentee voting due to racism in past elections.
Ultimately, he reiterates a willingness to collaborate with the OBA on the PLP Government’s reforms, but says MP Robinson’s comments are “just politics”.
The union, Unite, said it was taking the action after what it said were “bad faith negotiations over pay and conditions”
International News via Reuters:
Workers at British defence group BAE Systems in northwest England plan to take part in strikes from February 2 until at least February 20 in a dispute over pay and conditions, a union representing them said on Monday.
The union, Unite, said it was taking the action after what it said were “bad faith negotiations over pay and conditions”.
It said the company had imposed a pay deal of 3.6% in 2025 “against their will”, arguing that it was below the rate of inflation and amounted to a real terms pay cut. More than 1,200 of its members planned to participate in the walkouts, it said.
A BAE spokesperson said the company’s latest offer included enhancements to pay and pensions, describing it as “market-leading pay and reward”, while ensuring it also balanced its need to be competitive and affordable for customers.
“We remain committed to a partnership approach with all our trade union groups. Our production lines remain operational and we expect them to remain so during this period,” the spokesperson added.
BAE, which employs around 50,000 people across 50 sites in the UK, said it expected about 200 of its staff to participate in the strike action, while 1,000 more could potentially take industrial action short of a strike without a full stoppage of work, its spokesperson said.
Reporting by Sam Tabahriti, writing by Muvija M; editing by Michael Holden
Brent crude futures were down $3.25, or 4.7%, at $66.07 per barrel by 11:21 a.m. ET (1621 GMT)
International News via Reuters:
Oil prices fell 5% on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran was “seriously talking” with Washington, signalling de-escalation of tensions with the OPEC member, while a stronger dollar and milder weather forecasts also pressured prices.
Brent crude futures were down $3.25, or 4.7%, at $66.07 per barrel by 11:21 a.m. ET (1621 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude fell $3.27, or 5%, to $61.94 per barrel.
On Saturday Trump told reporters Iran was “seriously talking”, hours after Tehran’s top security official Ali Larijani said arrangements for negotiations were underway.
Trump had repeatedly threatened Iran with intervention if it did not agree to a nuclear deal or continued killing protesters. The threats underpinned oil prices throughout January, said Priyanka Sachdeva, an analyst at Phillip Nova.
Oil prices were also under pressure due to strength in the dollar after Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair. A stronger dollar makes commodities such as oil and gold more expensive for foreign investors, weighing on demand.
Meanwhile, forecasts of milder weather in the U.S. were another bearish development for oil prices as diesel futures pulled back sharply, Ritterbusch and Associates said. U.S. futures prices for diesel, used in heating and power generation, were down nearly 7% on Monday.
Together with tensions in the Middle East, a polar vortex in the U.S. had helped U.S. WTI futures rise 14% and Brent gain 16% in January, PVM analysts said in a note. With those issues fading in relevance, the focus is returning to a widely anticipated buildup of global oil inventories this year, they said.
At a meeting on Sunday, OPEC+ agreed to keep its oil output unchanged for March. In November, the grouping had frozen further planned increases for January through March 2026 because of seasonally weaker consumption.
Reporting by Shariq Khan and Enes Tunagur in London; Additional reporting by Katya Golubkova in Tokyo and Sudarshan Varadhan in Singapore; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Jan Harvey, Louise Heavens and David Gregorio
Bermuda’s elite equestrian talent delivered a masterclass in precision and composure on Saturday, securing a formidable team result at the Caribbean Equestrian Association (CEA) Regional Jumping Challenge. Competing at the National Equestrian Centre on Vesey Street, the home side produced a collective effort that underscores the island’s rising status in the regional jumping ranks.
The CEA Regional Jumping Challenge is a unique competitive format that sees Bermuda go head-to-head with riders from across the Caribbean, including Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Cayman Islands, as well as representatives from Antigua & Barbuda, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Martinique.
Bermuda’s three-member squad finished the high-stakes encounter with a combined total of just four faults, establishing a high benchmark for the chasing Caribbean nations.
Leading the charge in Class A (0.75m) was McKenna Redcliffe aboard the seasoned Tuck Everlasting. Redcliffe navigated the technical course with poise, delivering a clinical clear round in a rapid time of 59.09 seconds to secure a perfect start for the team.
The momentum continued in Class B (0.85m), where Sophie Greenway and Chevy CG Z faced a challenging set of related distances. Despite picking up four penalty fault points, Greenway’s aggressive pace of 63.80 seconds ensured her contribution remained vital to the overall team score.
The day’s most dominant individual performance came from Logan Flood in Class C (0.95m). Riding the talented Dorus du Domain Z, Flood produced a blistering clear round, stopping the clock at 58.24 seconds—the fastest clear time of the Bermuda trio—to anchor the squad’s impressive performance.
Following the conclusion of the international challenge, the Bermuda Equestrian Federation (BEF) hosted a comprehensive Support Show, providing a platform for the island’s junior and amateur ranks to gain valuable competitive experience at the national stadium.
The focus for Bermuda’s jumping community now shifts to the FEI Jumping World Challenge, with Competition 1 scheduled to return to the National Equestrian Centre on Saturday, February 7th.
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