News in Brief

Date: 25 May 2024 - 22:13

News ID: ۱۲۷۶۷۸

SYDNEY (Reuters) – More than 300 people and over 1,100 houses were buried by a massive landslide that levelled a remote village in northern Papua New Guinea, local media reported on Saturday. Hundreds are feared dead in the landslide that hit Kaokalam village in Enga Province, about 600 km (370 miles) northwest of capital Port Moresby, around 3 a.m. on Friday (1900 GMT on Thursday). The landslide in the Pacific nation north of Australia buried more than 300 people and 1,182 houses, the Papua New Guinea Post Courier said, citing comments from a member of the country’s parliament, Aimos Akem. Akem did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment via social media. More than six villages had been impacted by the landslide in the province’s Mulitaka region, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said on Saturday.

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LONDON (Reuters) – More than 10,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Britain in small boats so far this year, updated government data showed on Saturday, underlining a key challenge facing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of a July 4 national election.  The number of people landing on England’s southern beaches after making the dangerous Channel crossing fell by a third in 2023, but the latest numbers on a government website showed 10,170 arrived between January and May 25, up from 7,395 over the same period last year. “We continue to work closely with our French partners to prevent crossings and save lives,” an interior ministry spokesperson said in response to the surge in numbers. Sunak, who announced the election date on Wednesday, said later this week that asylum seekers who come to Britain illegally would not be deported to Rwanda before the vote - casting doubt on one of his Conservative Party’s flagship policies. The plan has been bogged down by legal obstacles for more than two years, and the opposition Labour Party, which is about 20 points ahead in opinion polls and seen on track to end 14 years of Conservative rule, has promised to scrap the policy if it wins the election.

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LONDON (Bloomberg) – All UK political parties need to be honest about the painful fiscal choices facing the next government during the coming election campaign, the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank announced. The challenge awaiting the winner is greater than any government has faced since at least the 1950s and wishful thinking that growth will come to the rescue would be to rely on getting “miraculously lucky”, IFS Director Paul Johnson stated. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fired the starting gun on a July 4 election. The ruling Conservatives and Labour opposition are expected to publish their manifestos within a fortnight and are already claiming the other’s plans are undeliverable. Both have pledged to stabilize a debt burden that is now close to 100% of GDP. However, whoever wins will be hemmed in by high debt, high interest rates and low growth, the IFS added.

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TEXAS (Dispatches) – Families of the victims killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have filed two wrongful death lawsuits: one against the firearm manufacturer and another against two technology companies, Meta and Microsoft, for their alleged role in marketing the weapon used. Friday’s pair of lawsuits came on the second anniversary of the school shooting, one of the deadliest in United States history. The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, attacked Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, and killed 19 children and two teachers, leaving 17 more people injured. The defendant in the first lawsuit, filed in the Uvalde County District Court, is Daniel Defense, a Georgia-based weapons manufacturer that produced the rifle the gunman used. The second lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, takes aim at Meta, owner of the social media platform Instagram, and the video game company Activision Blizzard, a subsidiary of Microsoft.

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WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – Big tech companies have effectively diverted global attention away from the ongoing existential threat that AI continues to present to humanity, a prominent scientist of artificial intelligence says. Max Tegmark told the AI Summit in Seoul that the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs. Tegmark, who trained as a physicist, recalled 1942 when Enrico Fermi built the first ever reactor with a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under a Chicago football field.  “When the top physicists at the time found out about that, they really freaked out, because they realized that the single biggest hurdle remaining to building a nuclear bomb had just been overcome. They realized that it was just a few years away – and in fact, it was three years, with the Trinity test in 1945.” In Seoul, just one out of the three “high-level” groups focused on safety as a direct concern, examining a wide range of risks, “from privacy breaches to job market disruptions and potential catastrophic outcomes”.

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SANTAIGO (AP) – Authorities in Chile have arrested a firefighter and a forestry official on suspicion of starting a blaze that killed 137 people in the resort city of Vina del Mar in February. “An arrest warrant was issued today against the person who started the fires in February in the Valparaiso region,” where Vina del Mar is located, police director Eduardo Cerna told a news conference. A little later, the Valparaiso regional prosecutor’s office confirmed the arrest of a second suspect, an official of the National Forestry Corporation (Conaf), the body responsible for fighting forest fires and managing national parks. Both men will be remanded in custody on Saturday on charges of arson resulting in deaths. Several fires broke out simultaneously on February 2 around the coastal city of Vina del Mar, 70 miles (110km) northwest of Chile’s capital Santiago. The inferno, the second deadliest in the world this century, was fuelled by winds and a heatwave that saw temperatures of about 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).