Globe Trot: Russian plane lands on frozen river by mistake
Moscow: A Soviet-era Antonov-24 aircraft carrying 30 passengers landed on a frozen river near an airport in Russia’s far east on Thursday because of pilot error. The Polar Airlines An-24 landed safely on the Kolyma river near Zyryanka in the Yakutia region, the prosecutors said. “According to preliminary information, the cause of the aviation incident was an error by the crew in piloting the aircraft,” a spokesperson for the Eastern Siberian transport prosecutor said in a statement. -Reuters
Thousands without power in storm-hit UK
London: A storm that battered the UK with high winds and heavy snow damaged houses, cancelled trains and left thousands of people without electricity Thursday across Scotland and parts of northern England. Workers dealt with wind speeds of 80 miles per hour in some coastal areas of Scotland as they tried to restore power to households and businesses that were cut off when falling branches and other debris hit utility lines. -AP
NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft for ‘stealing’ stories
Washington: The New York Times is striking back against the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the news industry, filing a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its stories to train chatbots. The Times says the companies are threatening its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists, in some cases spitting out Times’ material verbatim to people who seek answers from generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. -AP
NASA craft set to fly closest-ever to Jupiter’s moon
Washington: NASA’s Juno spacecraft is set to make the closest flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io that any spacecraft has made in over 20 years. Juno will pass within roughly 1,500 kilometres from the surface of Io — the most volcanic world in our solar system — on Saturday. “By combining data from this flyby with our previous observations, the Juno science team is studying how Io’s volcanoes vary,” said Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.
