‘Experienced’ BlackHawk crew was on training flight before collision

An air traffic controller was given the job of two people after one worker clocked off early on the evening the American Airlines jet and U.S. military helicopter collided in Washington, DC, according to a report.

Airplane and helicopter traffic is normally handled by two separate controllers until 9:30 p.m., but a supervisor allegedly merged the two jobs before the allotted changeover time, a source told The New York Times. A preliminary Federal Aviation Administration report concluded that staffing levels were “not normal” at the time.

American Eagle flight 5342 – carrying 64 people – and the military Black Hawk helicopter – carrying three people – crashed at approximately 8:53 p.m. on Wednesday.

At least 40 bodies have been recovered from the Potomac River – with many loved ones and local officials identifying the victims. Two “black boxes” have also been recovered with a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder have been taken for lab analysis, the National Transportation Safety Board said.

President Donald Trump linked the FAA’s diversity, equity and inclusion to the incident on Thursday, stating that “a group within the FAA determined that the workforce was too white”.

Chinese state media blames US for cyberattack that disrupted DeepSeek

A massive cyberattack that forced DeepSeek to close its groundbreaking AI model for new registrations on Tuesday originated in the US, Chinese state media has claimed.

The Chinese startup released its new AI system, called R1, last week and the development immediately rocked the Western tech industry and stock markets.

DeepSeek claims its AI model cost a fraction of the money and computing power to train compared to its rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which employs more expensive Nvidia chips.

R1 quickly gained popularity, climbing to the top of the list of free apps downloaded from Apple Store, surpassing ChatGPT.

As news spread over the weekend that the DeepSeek system matched the most advanced AI models of American tech giants such as Google, OpenAI and Meta despite being far more cost-effective and open-source, investors in companies such as Nvidia and Oracle began selling their stocks, wiping off nearly a trillion dollars in value from the American stock market on Monday.

Nvidia is the leading supplier of chips used to train advanced AI models.

On Tuesday, DeepSeek said that it came under a brute-force cyberattack.

The company limited R1 signups with phone numbers in China and prohibited registrations from international users.

A banner on its app notified users that it faced “malicious attacks” without revealing where they were coming from.

“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the notification said. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support.”

On Wednesday, DeepSeek notified users that the issue had been identified, and a fix was being implemented.

Not long after, Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, claimed the attacks originated from IP addresses in the US.

While initial attacks disrupted DeepSeek by overwhelming its servers and bandwidth with a flood of internet traffic, according to the Chinese cybersecurity company QAX Technology Group, the more recent ones attempted to crack user credentials by checking all possible password combinations to understand how the AI model worked.

“All the attack IPs were recorded, all are from the US,” QAX cybersecurity expert Wang Hui told CCTV.

The cyberattack on DeepSeek has raised concerns about the security of AI platforms and the risks they pose to users.

Bill Conner, former security adviser to American and British governments, said DeepSeek “represents a clear risk to any enterprise whose leadership values data privacy, security and transparency”.

US president Donald Trump warned that DeepSeek’s emergence was a “wake-up call” for American AI giants.

Some AI experts have also raised concerns about DeepSeek’s ties to the Chinese government.

The controlling shareholder of the startup based in Hangzhou is Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of a quantitative hedge fund called High-Flyer. Mr Liang attended a symposium for businessmen and experts hosted by Chinese premier Li Qiang the day the new DeepSeek model was released, according to state news agency Xinhua.

When is a mountain a person?

A mountain in New Zealand is now officially recognised as a human.

Considered an ancestor by Indigenous people, the mountain was recognised as a legal person on Thursday after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Māori name — is considered an ancestor by Indigenous people.

The snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 2,518 meters (8,261 feet) and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.

It was recognised as a legal person on Thursday after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

It is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in New Zealand, which has ruled that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people before.

The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Māori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonized. It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country’s government to Indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.

The law passed on Thursday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kāhui Tupua, which the law views as “a living and indivisible whole.” It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, “incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements.”

A newly created entity will be “the face and voice” of the mountain, the law says, with four members from local Māori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country’s Conservation Minister.

“The mountain has long been an honored ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place,” Paul Goldsmith, the lawmaker responsible for the settlements between the government and Māori tribes, told Parliament in a speech on Thursday.

But colonizers of New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries took first the name of Taranaki and then the mountain itself. In 1770, the British explorer Captain James Cook spotted the peak from his ship and named it Mount Egmont.

Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga:

In 1840, Māori tribes and representatives of the British crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi — New Zealand’s founding document — in which the Crown promised Māori would retain rights to their land and resources. But the Māori and English versions of the treaty differed — and Crown breaches of both began immediately.

In 1865, a vast swathe of Taranaki land, including the mountain, was confiscated to punish Māori for rebeling against the Crown. Over the next century hunting and sports groups had a say in the mountain’s management — but Māori did not.

“Traditional Māori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted,” Goldsmith said. But a Māori protest movement of the 1970s and ’80s has led to a surge of recognition for the Māori language, culture and rights in New Zealand law.

Redress has included billions of dollars in Treaty of Waitangi settlements — such as the agreement with the eight tribes of Taranaki, signed in 2023.

“Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Te Pāti Māori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, using a phrase that means ancestral mountain.

“We grew up knowing there was nothing anyone could do to make us any less connected,” she added.

The mountain’s legal rights are intended to uphold its health and wellbeing. They will be employed to stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will remain.

New Zealand was the first country in the world to recognise natural features as people when a law passed in 2014 granted personhood to Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island. Government ownership ceased and the tribe Tūhoe became its guardian.

“Te Urewera is ancient and enduring, a fortress of nature, alive with history; its scenery is abundant with mystery, adventure, and remote beauty,” the law begins, before describing its spiritual significance to Māori. In 2017, New Zealand recognised the Whanganui River as human, as part of a settlement with its local iwi.

The bill recognizing the mountain’s personhood was affirmed unanimously by Parliament’s 123 lawmakers. The vote was greeted by a ringing waiata — a Māori song — from the public gallery, packed with dozens who had traveled to the capital, Wellington, from Taranaki.

The unity provided brief respite in a tense period for race relations in New Zealand. In November, tens of thousands of people marched to Parliament to protest a law that would reshape the Treaty of Waitangi by setting rigid legal definitions for each clause. Detractors say the law — which is not expected to pass — would strip Māori of legal rights and dramatically reverse progress from the past five decades.

Japanese city told to use less water to help sinkhole rescue

Efforts to rescue a 74-year-old driver continued on Thursday, days after a massive sinkhole in the Japanese city of Yashio swallowed up his truck.

Japanese authorities have asked 1.2 million people across 12 cities and towns in the eastern part of Saitama prefecture to limit showers and laundry use and thereby ease the pressure on the sewer system.

“Putting our first priority on saving the person’s life, we are asking residents to refrain from non-essential use of water such as taking a bath or doing laundry,” a Saitama prefecture official told AFP on Thursday.

“Using toilets is difficult to refrain from, but we are asking to use less water as much as possible.”

The massive sinkhole appeared in Yashio at around 10am local time on Tuesday, Saitama prefecture governor Motohiro Ono said. The crater measured about 32ft wide and 16ft deep.

“It is thought to have been caused by a crack in the Nakagawa River Basin sewer pipe,” Mr Ono said on Tuesday. “As a result of this collapse, a passing truck fell in.”

Efforts to save the 74-year-old driver have since been complicated by unstable ground, a second, larger sinkhole, and seeping water, local media reported. The second sinkhole in Yashio appeared on Thursday after wastewater from a ruptured sewage pipe flooded the original sinkhole.

This then caused further collapses, bringing down a utility pole and a restaurant signboard.

Eventually the two sinkholes merged, creating a 20m-wide crater, which has complicated the rescue of the 74-year-old truck driver.

Authorities have attempted to rescue the driver by using cranes to lift his truck, but they were only able to recover the loading platform, leaving the cabin – where the driver is believed to be trapped – behind.

Efforts to remove sediment and dig him out have so far been unsuccessful. Officials also deployed a drone into the hole to assess whether rescue workers could climb down, but no progress has been made.

The expanded sinkhole also contains a gas pipeline, raising concerns about a potential leak, leading to evacuations of 200 households.

Rescue workers were pumping air into the hole to supply oxygen to the 74-year-old driver on Tuesday. The driver was initially conscious but by the evening of the same day became unresponsive, according to local media reports.

In the past decade, several sinkholes have appeared across Japan. In September 2024, a sinkhole in Hiroshima was caused by a burst underground water pipe.

In 2016, Fukuoka experienced a massive sinkhole, about 98ft wide and 50ft deep, that swallowed five road lanes.

Additional reporting by agencies

Man who moved family to Pakistan kills daughter over TikTok content

A man who had recently brought his family back to Pakistan from the United States has confessed to shooting dead his teenage daughter, motivated by his disapproval of her TikTok content, police said.

The shooting happened on a street in the southwestern city of Quetta on Tuesday. The suspect, Anwar ul-Haq, initially said that unidentified gunmen shot and killed his American-born, 15-year-old daughter before he confessed to the crime, police official Babar Baloch said.

“Our investigation so far has found that the family had an objection to her dressing, lifestyle, and social gathering,” another police investigator, Zohaib Mohsin, said. “We have her phone. It is locked,” he told Reuters. “We are probing all aspects, including honour killing.”

The family had recently returned to Balochistan province in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, a nation with conservative social norms, having lived in the United States for about 25 years, Baloch said.

The southwestern city of Quetta:

The suspect has U.S. citizenship, the officer said. He said Haq had told him his daughter began creating “objectionable” content on the social media platform TikTok when she lived in the United States.

He told police that she continued to share videos on the platform after returning to Pakistan. Baloch said the main suspect’s brother-in-law had also been arrested in connection with the killing.

Police said they had charged Haq with the murder. They did not offer proof of Haq’s U.S. citizenship except for the suspect’s own testimony and declined to say whether the U.S. embassy had been informed of the incident.

His family declined to respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.

More than 54 million people use TikTok in Pakistan, a nation of 241 million. The government has blocked the video-sharing app several times in recent years over content moderation.

This week hundreds of Pakistani journalists rallied against a proposed law to regulate social media content that they say is aimed at curbing press freedom and controlling the digital landscape.

The law would establish a regulatory authority that would have its own investigation agency and tribunals. Those found to have disseminated false or fake information face prison sentences of up to three years and fines of 2 million rupees ($7,200)

Digital media in Pakistan has already been muffled with measures by telecom authorities to slow down internet speeds, and social media platform X has been blocked for more than a year.

TikTok, which has about 170 million U.S users, was briefly taken offline in America just before a law requiring its Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban took effect on January 19.

Islamabad often takes issue with what it terms “obscene content” with the social media platform, which has lately started complying with requests from Pakistan to remove certain content.

Over 1,000 women are killed each year in Pakistan at the hands of community or family members over perceived damage to “honour”, according to independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

That could involve eloping, posting social media content, fraternising with men, or any other infraction against conservative values relating to women.

Australian teacher captured by Russian forces in Ukraine is alive

An Australian man who was feared dead after being captured by Russian forces is alive, foreign minister Penny Wong has announced.

Oscar Jenkins, 32, a teacher who signed up to fight for Ukraine against Russia, was taken captive in December last year. A video showed him being struck by a Russian interrogator, sparking fears for his life.

“The Australian government has received confirmation from Russia that Oscar Jenkins is alive and in custody,” Ms Wong said on Wednesday.

Australia still has “serious concerns for Mr Jenkins as a prisoner of war”, she said.

“We have made clear to Russia in Canberra and in Moscow that Mr Jenkins is a prisoner of war and Russia is obligated to treat him in accordance with international humanitarian law, including humane treatment.”

Canberra has called on Russia to release Mr Jenkins.

“If Russia does not provide Mr Jenkins the protections he is entitled to under international humanitarian law, our response will be unequivocal,” Ms Wong said.

Russia has previously warned that foreign fighters in Ukraine will not be afforded the rights given to lawful combatants according to international humanitarian law.

“I wish to make an official statement that none of the mercenaries the West is sending to Ukraine to fight for the nationalist regime in Kyiv can be considered as combatants in accordance with international humanitarian law or enjoy the status of prisoners of war,” a defence ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying by TASS after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“At best, they can expect to be prosecuted as criminals. We are urging all foreign citizens who may have plans to go and fight for Kyiv’s nationalist regime to think a dozen times before getting on the way.”

Ms Wong thanked Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha and the International Committee of the Red Cross president for their “ongoing advocacy for Mr Jenkins”.

The Russian ambassador said Mr Jenkins was in the custody of the armed forces, The Guardian reported. His health condition is said to be “normal”.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular support to Mr Jenkins’ family.

Another foreign fighter who trained with Mr Jenkins said earlier this month that he believed the Russian forces had executed the Australian prisoner to make an example of him, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 14 January.

Soon after, prime minister Anthony Albanese said that his government was “gravely concerned” about the capture of Mr Jenkins and warned of the “strongest action possible” if reports of his death were correct.

On 14 January, Australia summoned Russian ambassador Alexey Pavlovsky to answer questions about Mr Jenkins’s status. “The Russian Federation is obligated to treat all prisoners of war in accordance with international humanitarian law,” a spokesperson said in a statement at the time.

DeepSeek goes quiet for lunar new year despite worldwide buzz

DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that shook the world of technology this week with its groundbreaking artificial intelligence models, has taken a break for the lunar new year holiday.

The firm rocked the industry and global stock markets – wiping off around a trillion dollars in value from US stocks on Monday – by releasing cost-effective and open-source AI models rivalling the most advanced models of American tech giants OpenAI, Google and Meta.

And while the Silicon Valley, the Wall Street and the American political establishment, including new president Donald Trump, were still discussing the implications of DeepSeek’s breakthrough, the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou went quiet for the weeklong lunar new year holiday.

The last update to DeepSeek was issued late on Monday, and local media reports said the start-up’s offices were deserted for the holidays from Tuesday morning.

The lunar new year is based on a 12-year cycle, each linked to an animal in the Chinese zodiac paired with one of the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The festivities began on Wednesday, marking the year of the wood snake.

There was still buzz around the company, however, with security turning away uninvited guests at its headquarters, Tech in Asia reported.

The company claimed earlier this week that its advanced AI model, named R1, was trained at a fraction of the cost of its western rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which employed a larger volume of expensive Nvidia chips to train.

DeepSeek said its AI model cost less than $6 million in computing power to train with older Nvidia H800 chips, in sharp contrast to the billions poured into creating similar systems by US companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google. The startup was forced to rely on older chips because the US had banned the export of advanced Nvidia systems to China in a bid to curtail its progress in AI.

DeepSeek’s success against such steep odds quickly led to sharp changes in the fortunes of major American AI companies. Shares of Nvidia plunged 17 per cent on Tuesday, marking the biggest single-day loss in market value of a company in history of over $500bn (£402bn).

Mr Trump warned the Chinese startup’s success was a “wake-up call” for the US tech industry.

“DeepSeek’s release of a premium level AI tool, available freely, with a reported miniscule development cost has shaken faith in Silicon Valley and American dominance in the rapidly developing AI market,” Richard Whittle, an economist at the University of Salford, said.

In spite of their remarkable achievement, the DeepSeek team keep a low profile. The startup’s controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded a quantitative hedge fund called High-Flyer. It is unclear how much stake the hedge fund has in DeepSeek.

Government records indicate that High-Flyer owns patents for the chips used to train AI models.

Not much is publicly known about the other employees of Deepseek, whose official name, according to government records, is Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Technology Research Co Ltd.

A study posted by the company on its AI model in the arXiv database credits nearly 70 employees.

Passengers and crew evacuated as plane catches fire on runway

An Airbus aircraft caught fire at an airport in South Korea on Tuesday evening, forcing the evacuation of all 176 people on board.

The fire, which started in the tail section of the Airbus A321 as it was preparing to take off at the Gimhae international airport in Busan, led to seven people suffering injuries, according to the state news agency Yonhap.

The Air Busan flight was bound for Hong Kong.

Four of the injured were crew members who experienced chest discomfort from smoke inhalation. The other three were passengers, including a woman in her 70s and two individuals in their 50s, who reported pain in their tailbones and backs.

Firefighters quickly responded to the plane, containing the blaze that had spread to the fuselage. The National Fire Agency said in a statement the fire was fully extinguished at 11.31pm local time on Tuesday, about an hour after firefighters and fire trucks were deployed to the scene.

The cause of the fire was under investigation.

The Gimhae airport resumed normal operations on Wednesday, with all 279 scheduled flights running as planned except for eight Air Busan flights that were cancelled.

Air Busan is a budget carrier affiliated with Asiana Airlines, which was acquired by Korean Air in December.

The Independent has reached out to Air Busan for comment.

The incident came less than a month after a deadly plane crash at the Muan international airport killed 179 people.

Footage showed the Jeju Air plane skidding on the runway after its landing gear failed to deploy, crashing into a concrete wall and catching fire.

Only two crew members seated near the rear of the Boeing 737-800 jet survived the crash of the aircraft, which had arrived from Bangkok.

Among the passengers were five children under 10, including a three-year-old.

The preliminary investigation report, released on Monday, indicated that bird strikes played a role in the crash, but didn’t make any conclusions about the cause of the accident.