Cause, ‘people responsible’ for India train crash known I

NDIA’S Railway Minister said Sunday the cause and people responsible for the country’s worst train crash in decades had been identified, pointing to an electronic signal system without giving further details.

“We have identified the cause of the accident and the people responsible for it,” India’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told news agency ANI, but said it was “not appropriate” to give details before a final investigation report.

The death toll from Friday’s crash near Balasore, in the eastern state of Odisha, was expected to climb above 288.

Ashwini said the “change that occurred during electronic interlocking, the accident happened due to that,” a technical term referring to a complex signal system designed to stop trains colliding by arranging their movement on the tracks.

“Whoever did it, and how it happened, will be found out after proper investigation,” he added.

There was confusion about the exact sequence of events but reports cited railway officials as saying that a signaling error had sent the Coromandal Express running south from Kolkata to Chennai onto a side track.

It slammed into a freight train and the wreckage derailed an express running north from In-

AI sage: Human extinction threat is ‘overblown’

EVER since the poem churning ChatGPT burst on the scene six months ago, expert Gary Marcus has voiced caution against artificial intelligence’s ultra-fast development and adoption.

dia’s tech hub Bengaluru to Kolkata that was also passing the site.

Odisha state’s chief secretary Pradeep Jena confirmed that about 900 injured people had been hospitalized.

Desperate relatives searched Sunday for loved ones missing.

“I saw bloodied scenes, mangled bodies and one man with a severed arm being desperately helped by his injured son,” researcher Anubhav Das, 27, told AFP after surviving the crash.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the crash site and injured passengers being treated in hospital and said “no one responsible” would be spared.

“I pray that we get out of this sad moment as soon as possible,” he told state broadcaster Doordarshan.

A high school close to the crash site had been turned into a makeshift morgue, but officials said many of the bodies were so disfigured that many of the distraught families could only spot their loved ones by pieces of jewelry. AFP

But against AI’s apocalyptic doomsayers, the New York University emeritus professor told AFP in a recent interview that the technology’s existential threats may currently be “overblown.”

“I’m not personally that concerned about extinction risk, at least for now, because the scenarios are not that concrete,” said Marcus in San Francisco.

“A more general problem that I am worried about... is that we’re building AI systems that we don’t have very good control over and I think that poses a lot of risks, (but) maybe not literally existential.”

Long before the advent of ChatGPT, Marcus designed his first AI program in high school – software to translate Latin into English and after years of studying child psychology, he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.

In March, alarmed that ChatGPT creator OpenAI was releasing its latest and more powerful AI model with Microsoft, Marcus signed an open letter with more than 1,000 people including Elon Musk calling for a global pause in AI development.

But last week he did not sign the more succinct statement by business leaders and specialists—including OpenAI boss Sam Altman—that caused a stir.

Global leaders should be working to reduce “the risk of extinction” from artificial intelligence technology, the signatories insisted.

The one-line statement said tackling the risks from AI should be “a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” operating at the accident site of a three-train collision near Balasore in India on June 4, 2023. Authorities were scrambling to understand the cause of the collision that killed at least 288 people, claiming that ‘no one responsible’ will be spared. AFP

Signatories included those who are building systems with a view to achieving “general” AI, a technology that would hold the cognitive abilities on par with those of humans.

“If you really think there’s existential risk, why are you working on this at all? That’s a pretty fair question to ask,” Marcus said. AFP

Hong Kong, China beef up security on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

HONG KONG boosted security around a park Sunday where tens of thousands of people used to gather for an annual memorial of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, ensuring no protests on the event’s 34th anniversary.

In past years, Hong Kongers would converge on Victoria Park and its surrounding Causeway Bay neighborhood to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989 – taking part in a candlelight vigil or watching performances about the bloody incident.

But this weekend, the park hosts a “hometown carnival fair” organized by pro-Beijing groups, with scores of police deployed in the adjacent shopping district a day after four people were arrested for “seditious” acts and “disorderly conduct.”

Police searched shoppers in Causeway Bay on Saturday, and moved quickly to remove performance artists and activists.

In Brief

Kim’s sister slams UN meet on Nokor

NORTH Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong slammed the UN Security Council for holding a “most unfair” meeting over Pyongyang’s recent spy satellite launch, state media reported on Sunday.

North Korea’s new Chollima-1 rocket lost thrust and crashed into the sea with its satellite payload on Wednesday, Pyongyang said in a rare same-day announcement, adding that another test will be conducted as soon as possible.

The United States, South Korea and Japan slammed the launch, saying it violated UN resolutions barring the nuclear-armed country from any tests using ballistic missile technology.

The UN’s under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo, took the Security Council to task on Friday for a “lack of unity and action” on North Korea’s tests.

Kim Yo Jong said the UN meeting was another reminder the council was acting as a “political appendage” to “gangster-like” Washington.

“I am very unpleased that the UNSC so often calls to account the DPRK’s exercise of its rights as a sovereign state at the request of the US,” she said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency and referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. AFP

Four people were also detained on suspicion of “breaching the peace.”

AFP saw artist Sanmu Chen chant “Don’t forget June 4!” before he was bundled into a police bus.

Discussion of the Tiananmen crackdown is highly sensitive to China’s communist leadership, and commemoration is forbidden on the mainland.

Thirty-four years ago, the government sent troops and tanks to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to break up peaceful protests, brutally crushing a weeks-long wave of demonstrations calling for political change.

Hundreds—by some estimates, more than 1,000—were killed. For decades, Hong Kong was the only Chinese city with a large-scale commemoration of the incident—a key index of the liberties and political pluralism afforded by its semiautonomous status. AFP

Ukraine strike kills girl, injures 22

AN AIRSTRIKE hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, killing a two-year-old girl and injuring 22 others, officials said Sunday.

The attack, which President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed on Russia, partially destroyed a pair of two-storey buildings as well as 10 private homes, a shop and a gas pipeline, according to the region’s governor.

Russian airstrikes over Ukraine have ratcheted up in recent weeks, as have incursions in the opposite direction.

Kyiv has for months said it is preparing a major counteroffensive against Moscow’s occupation forces, hoping to reclaim territory lost since Russia invaded in February 2022.

After Saturday’s strike, a girl’s body was pulled from the wreckage.

“At night, a girl’s body was retrieved from under the rubble of a house in the Pidhorodnenska community,” Serhiy Lysak, governor of Dnipropetrovsk region, posted on Telegram early Sunday.

“She just turned two.”

“22 people were injured, 5 of them were children,” he added, having said earlier that three boys were in serious condition at hospital. Zelensky blamed Russia for the strike, saying more people were trapped beneath the wreckage.

“The Russians attacked the city,” Zelensky posted on Facebook on Saturday.

“Once again, Russia proves it is a terrorist state. The Russians will bear responsibility for everything committed against our state and people.” AFP