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A man looks inside the Changan Deepal S05 REEV during a press conference for the unveiling of the Chinese model at the WesBank Festival of Motoring. Nqobile Dludla/Reuters Chinese car makers launched a raft of electric, hybrid and bakkie models at South Africa’s biggest motor show last week, betting on growing demand for electrified vehicles and looking to challenge established rivals in the country’s highly competitive bakkie market.

The JSE has suspended trading in Labat Africa’s shares with immediate effect after the technology investment holding company failed to pay the first dividend in its 27 years as a listed company.

South African talk radio is the last big pool of news that nobody can search. Locl is an attempt to change that: a platform that listens to the live streams of the country’s major English-language talk stations, transcribes everything, indexes it and lets you look up any name, brand or subject and find every time it was mentioned on air. The stations it ingests are 702, Cape Talk, Power FM and SAfm, with plans to include non-English platforms in time.

Every week or so, an e-mail lands in my inbox that says more or less the same thing. Somebody’s forwarded me a price from another IT company, and underneath it, one line: “Can you beat this?” Fair question. It’s the only question that seems to make sense, because from where you’re standing all of us look like the same company wearing different logos. Same vendors. Same words: cloud, cybersecurity, backups, support.

The Koeberg nuclear power station. Image: 6000.co.za/BY-NC-ND 2.0 Africa’s only nuclear power station is generating no electricity. Eskom said on Thursday that Koeberg unit 1 was taken offline just before 1am following a turbine trip, and that the unit was removed from service safely and within procedure. The statement does not mention that unit 2 has been out of service since 26 April, on a 150-day maintenance and refuelling outage tied to the station’s life-extension programme.

Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard is designed to let AI agents operate instruments like this one directly Anthropic has opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, a specification that lets AI agents discover and operate physical devices – microscopes, liquid handlers, robotic arms, lasers – without a custom integration for each one. The claim is that work that takes a laboratory weeks or months, and usually needs a specialist, drops to hours or minutes.

Meta Platforms has emerged from its biggest legal challenge in the US with its core business intact. The social media giant agreed on Wednesday to pay as much as US$18-billion over a decade and limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under a sweeping agreement with nearly all US states to resolve claims that it designed those platforms to addict children. Meta denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.

AI is rapidly becoming part of everyday customer interactions. Whether you are speaking to your bank, insurer, healthcare provider or retailer, there is an increasing chance your first conversation is with AI. As businesses adopt AI voice agents, one question becomes more important than any other: can you trust the AI that is speaking to your customers? At 1Stream, we believe trust should not be claimed. It should be independently verified.

Telviva CEO David Meintjes Telviva, a provider of cloud-based unified communications, has launched Viva, an intelligent voice and text-based digital agent designed to make enterprise-grade AI practical, affordable and accessible for South African businesses. Built and hosted locally, Viva is the next step in Telviva’s work on business conversations, changing how companies route interactions and draw on what their organisations already know.

The Voltalia facility near Tzaneen Voltalia did not build a single kilometre of transmission line to get its electricity from Limpopo to Richards Bay. Instead, it uses Eskom’s. Voltalia’s 148MW plant injects electricity into Eskom’s grid in Limpopo. Eskom meters what goes in and what RBM draws out at the other end, and reconciles the two financially against a schedule of standard prices.