Adams County Sheriff asks public’s help in locating shooting suspect

The Adams County Sheriff’s Office is asking the public’s help in locating a shooting suspect.

The shooting happened Aug. 19 near Dakin Street and Hilltop Circle, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.

A victim was seriously injured. Investigators believe the suspect was driving a red 2014 Chevrolet Cruze, Colorado license plate BIJ-C56.

Anyone with information on the shooting, or on a suspect, is asked to call Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867 (STOP).

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Standout Korean Spots for Standbys, Knife-Cut Noodles and More

New York’s high-end Korean restaurants are impressive. They’re also expensive. Here are seven options where you won’t go broke.

By Pete Wells

Prudential PLC Turns To Profit In H1 – Quick Facts

Prudential plc (PRU.L,PUK) reported Wednesday that its first-half IFRS profit attributable to equity holders was $944 million, compared to last year’s loss of $1.51 billion. IFRS earnings per share were 34.5 US cents, compared to loss of 55.1 US cents a year ago.

Profit before tax attributable to shareholders was $1.18 billion, compared to loss of $1.35 billion last year. Adjusted operating profit was $1.46 billion, up 4% from the prior year.

In the first half, new business profit climbed 36 percent to $1.49 billion from prior year’s $1.10 billion. The company noted that 17 of its life markets delivered growth, 16 of which by double digits. Excluding the effect of interest rate and other economic movements, new business profit was up 52 percent.

APE sales were up 42 percent to $3.03 billion and this sales momentum continues into the current third quarter.

Insurance revenue grew to $4.59 billion from last year’s $4.16 billion.

Further, the company said its Board has approved a 2023 first interim cash dividend of 6.26 cents per share, up 9 percent from 5.74 cents per share last year.

The company expects the annual dividend to grow in the range 7 percent to 9 percent per annum over 2023 and 2024.

For more earnings news, earnings calendar, and earnings for stocks, visit rttnews.com.

Meta Launches Advanced AI-powered Speech And Text Translations

Meta has launched an Artificial Intelligence-powered translation engine that can translate nearly 100 languages across text and speech.

The Facebook parent company said it is releasing the engine, known as Seamless M4T, under a Creative Commons license to allow researchers and developers to build on this work.

SeamlessM4T supports speech recognition for nearly 100 languages.

It supports speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and text-to-speech translation.

The technology giant is introducing a pioneering universal language translator at a time existing speech-to-speech and speech-to-text systems only cover a limited number of the world’s languages.

One advantage of the new AI-powered translation engine is that it can translate spoken words from one language to another without having to first convert to text behind the scenes.

Meta also released the metadata of SeamlessAlign, the biggest open multimodal translation dataset, totaling 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments.

Last year, Meta released No Language Left Behind (NLLB), a text-to-text machine translation model that supports 200 languages, and has since been integrated into Wikipedia as one of the translation providers.

Flowtech Fluidpower H1 Profit Before Tax Falls, But Revenue Edges Up

Flowtech Fluidpower plc (FLO.L), an engineering company, on Wednesday, reported lower profit before tax for the first half of the year on higher administrative expenses. However, revenues increased by 2.8 percent.

Looking forward, the company expects economic headwinds to continue through to the second half of the year and into fiscal 2024 with continued slowdown in industrial output and production.

Half yearly profit before tax decreased to 1.6 million pounds from 3.1 million pounds of last year.

After tax, Earnings fell to 2.28 pence per share from 4.24 pence per share.

Administration expenses climbed to 15.27 million pounds from 14.37 million pounds of previous year.

However, revenue rose to 59.1 million pounds from 57.5 million pounds on growth achieved in the solutions and services segments which increased by 11.5 percent and 9.8 percent respectively.

On Tuesday, shares of Flowtech Fluidpower closed at 83.90 on the London Stock Exchange.

Instem Agrees To Be Acquired By ARCHIMED In GBP 203 Mln Deal

IT solutions provider Instem Plc (INS.L) announced Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired by Ichor Management Ltd., controlled by funds managed by investment firm ARCHIMED, in approximately 203 million pounds deal.

It is intended that the acquisition will be implemented by way of a scheme of arrangement.

Under the terms of the recommended cash offer, each Instem Shareholder will be entitled to receive 833 pence in cash per Instem Share.

The acquisition price represents a premium of around 41 percent to the closing price of 590 pence per Instem Share on August 29, being the last business day prior to the announcement. It also represents a premium of 35 percent to the volume weighted average price per Instem Share during the three month period ended August 29.

The acquisition is currently expected to complete during the fourth quarter of 2023, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the conditions.

Instem Directors have already received and rejected a series of unsolicited proposals from ARCHIMED, with the first approach made in March 2023.

Instem provides workflow, data and IT solutions across the drug development lifecycle to the global life sciences market.

Instem Directors consider the terms of the acquisition to be fair and reasonable, and intend to recommend unanimously that the Instem Shareholders vote in favour of the deal.