NEPAL
Plane crash leaves 18 dead
A passenger plane yesterday crashed on takeoff at about 11:15am in Kathmandu, with the pilot rescued from the flaming wreckage, but all 18 others aboard killed, police said. The Saurya Airlines flight was carrying two crew and 17 of the company’s staff members, police spokesman Dan Bahadur Karki said. “The pilot has been rescued and is being treated,” he said. “Eighteen bodies have been recovered, including one foreigner.” The flight was being conducted for either technical or maintenance purposes, Gyanendra Bhul of the Civil Aviation Authority said, without giving further details.
EUROPEAN UNION
Global heat record broken
Monday was the hottest day on record globally, inching past Sunday, which had just taken the title, preliminary data from a EU monitoring agency showed. The global average surface air temperature rose to 17.15°C — 0.06°C higher than Sunday’s marginal record according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has been tracking such patterns since 1940. The record had last been set for four consecutive days in a row in early July last year.
UNITED STATES
Secret Service boss quits
The director of the Secret Service on Tuesday resigned in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. “I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Kimberly Cheatle, who had served as director since August 2022, said an e-mail to staff. Cheatle’s resignation came a day after she appeared before a congressional committee and was berated for hours by Democrats and Republicans for the security failures. She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
RSS