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Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He had been well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

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The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

Medvedev’s vitriolic comments on Wednesday followed a Times editorial in which the newspaper described the assassination of Lt Gen Igor Kirillov as “a legitimate act of defence” by Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility for the killing.

Kirillov, head of the military’s chemical, biological and radiological weapons unit, was killed along with his assistant when a device attached to an escooter exploded as the two men left a building in a residential area in south-east Moscow on Tuesday morning. Kirillov is the most senior Russian military official to be killed in an assassination away from the frontlines since the start of the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

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Russia has begun using North Korean troops in “significant numbers” to attack Ukrainian forces in Kursk region, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.

“Today, we already have preliminary data that the Russians have begun to use North Korean soldiers in their assaults” he said. “We have information suggesting their use could extend to other parts of the frontline.”

This comes as Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 15 Ukrainian drones overnight, Russian defence ministry said today.

Thirteen of the drones were downed over the Black Sea and one each over the Russian border regions of Kursk and Belgorod, the defence ministry said in a post on its Telegram messaging channel.

A bird strike involving an American Airlines jetliner disabled one of the plane’s two engines shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia airport, forcing the flight to turn around and land at John F Kennedy international airport, authorities said on Friday.

No one was injured in the incident on Thursday involving flight 1722, which took off from LaGuardia at 7.43pm with a destination of Charlotte, North Carolina, airline officials said.

The Federal Aviation Administration says bird strikes are increasing, with 19,400 strikes at 713 airports across the US last year alone. Rarely do they cause so much damage that commercial jetliners are forced to make emergency landings.

The pilot of the Airbus A321 declared an emergency at 7.52pm and diverted to JFK airport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the New York area’s major airports, said in a statement.

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In a brief order, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the charity’s appeal that the denial violates the First Amendment’s religious protections.

“Put another way, it doesn’t matter if Catholic Charities gives a cup of water in Jesus’ name, because non-religious charities offer cups of water too,” the group wrote in its petition. “That absurd result deepens a split between state courts that require religious entities to conform to stereotypes to qualify for the ‘religious purposes’ exemption and those that do not.”

It has been more than a year of the ongoing onslaught in Gaza, where experts and common people across the world recognize that a genocide is taking place. We have seen the decimation of Gaza’s hospitals, the use of starvation and disease as weapons of war, attacks on aid workers and the prevention of humanitarian aid, the invasion of Lebanon, Syria and West Bank cities, the arbitrary detention of 9,000 Palestinians, the use of white phosphorus, and the series of countless bombs, bombs and more bombs – all individually war crimes, and collectively, affronts to the very idea of international law and jurisprudence.

Like millions around the world, I watched Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old student, burn alive as he slept in a tent outside the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ hospital in central Gaza. I’ve seen my people unable to do anything as flames swallowed yet another martyr, another hospital, another set of refugees in tents. I’ve watched Israeli occupation forces in north Gaza prepare what appeared to be a mass grave, outside Indonesian hospital, lining up Palestinian men and boys with their hands tied and eyes blindfolded.

A massacre is being carried out in the shadows of media silence. As a Palestinian, the horror of watching the extermination of people crystallizes into a deep feeling of grief, shame and rage at the loss of humanity. And as a law student, I question the very profession I hope to join.

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The New York city mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Tuesday that an additional 25 shelters used to house asylum seekers will be closing in the coming two months.

The move comes amid a rightward tack by Adams, especially on the issue of immigration, which has seen him hew close to the incoming Donald Trump administration, which has plans for a mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.

The number of asylum seekers in city shelters is now at its lowest point in 17 months after decreasing for 22 straight weeks.

Among the closing shelters are the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center at Floyd Bennett Field, which houses about 2,000 people, with housing costs paid by New York state. The state will continue to reimburse New York City for the costs for equivalent care incurred at other migrant housing sites across the city.

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