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Ukraine rolled out emergency blackouts Tuesday after weeks of Russian strikes on power plants left the country unable to deal with a drop in temperatures, state power operator Ukrenergo said. Russia has launched some of its most devastating strikes on Ukraine's energy facilities in recent months, knocking out key facilities and forcing Ukraine to import electricity from neighbouring EU countries to meet demand. "From 21:00 to 24:00 (1800-2100 GMT), Ukrenergo is forced to introduce controlled emergency shutdowns in all regions of Ukraine," it said in a post on Telegram. "The reason for this is a significant shortage of electricity in the system as a result of Russian strikes and increased consumption due to a cold snap." It was unclear how severe the power outages were across the country. In the capital Kyiv, the city administration said 10 percent of households had been disconnected. Footage shared on social media from the western city of Lviv showed build...

Google on Tuesday said it would introduce AI-generated answers to online queries made by users in the United States, in one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years. "I'm excited to announce that we will begin launching this fully revamped experience, 'AI overviews,' to everyone in the US this week," Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said at an event in California. The feature would soon be available in other countries, he added. With the change, many of Google's search results will feature an AI "overview" at the top of the page before the more typical unfurling of links and features. The search engine's AI answers, generated by Google's Gemini AI technology, offer a paragraph or two of explanation with links to the online sources that supplied the information. "You can ask whatever's on your mind or whatever you need to get done - from researching to planning to brainstorming - and Google will take care of th...

Nobel-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro was best known as a master of the short story. Here are five from her celebrated trove: - 'Boys and Girls' (1964) - In one of her earliest stories, Munro delved into what would become a signature theme: the complex, often fraught transition to adulthood. Set on a fox farm and told from the point of view of a young girl, "Boys and Girls" explores gender conventions in 1940s small-town Ontario -- Munro's birthplace and home, and the setting for much of her writing. The story was included in her first book "Dance of the Happy Shades" (1968). - 'Royal Beatings' (1977) - This story is about daily family violence in a rural Canadian town begins with stepmother Flo's threat to administer a "royal beating" to her fiery teenaged stepdaughter, Rose.  The girl's imagination is sparked by the term, and she imagines chariots, horses and kings, but she discovers a far more brutal reality when h...

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Monday it would release a new AI model called GPT-4o, which reasons across voice, text and vision. OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, said during a livestream event that the new GPT-4o model would be offered for free because it is more efficient than the company's previous models. OpenAI researchers showed off ChatGPT's new voice assistant capabilities. In one demonstration, the ChatGPT voice assistant was able to read out a bedtime story in different voices, emotions and tones. In a second demonstration, the ChatGPT voice assistant used it vision capabilities to walk through solving a math equation written on a sheet of paper. Paid users of GPT-4o will have greater capacity limits than the company's paid users, Murati said. OpenAI is under pressure to expand the user base of ChatGPT, its popular chatbot product that wowed the world with its ability to produce human-like written content and top-notch software code. Shortly...

A 36-year-old Indian-origin man has been arrested in Canada in connection with a brazen multimillion-dollar gold heist at Toronto's main airport, almost a month after the arrest of five others involved in the theft -- the biggest in the country's history . On April 17, 2023, an air cargo container carrying more than 22 million Canadian dollars worth of gold bars and foreign currency was stolen from a secure storage facility using fake paperwork, Peels Regional Police said. The gold and currency had arrived on an Air Canada flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Shortly after the flight's landing, the cargo was offloaded and transported to a separate location on airport property. It was reported missing to the police a day later. On May 6, 2024, investigators arrested and charged Archit Grover at the airport in Toronto as he flew in from India, according to the police. The police had issued a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest earl...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed a new defence minister, nominating civilian Andrei Belousov, a former deputy prime minister who specialises in economics, for the job more than two years into the Ukraine war, the Kremlin said on Sunday. Putin wants Sergei Shoigu, defence minister since 2012 and a long-standing Putin ally, to become the secretary of Russia's Security Council replacing incumbent Nikolai Patrushev, and for him to also have responsibilities for the military-industrial complex, the Kremlin said. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia's General Staff, will remain in his post as will Sergei Lavrov, the country's veteran foreign minister, the Kremlin said. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.) from NDTV News-World-news https://ift.tt/vzKZ18L

Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said on Saturday that another one of the hostages abducted during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel has died. Hamas released a video saying that Nadav Popplewell , who was taken hostage from the southern Israeli community of Kibbutz Nirim, died after being wounded in an Israeli strike in Gaza. The Israeli military did not offer immediate comment on the latest video. It has referred to previous videos of hostages released by Hamas as psychological terror. It has also denied some of the previous accusations by Hamas that hostages were killed by Israeli fire. Earlier on Saturday Hamas released an undated video of the 51-year-old captive in front of a white wall, with a bruise on his right eye, and speaking his name. Hours later, in the second video, it said Popplewell died of wounds sustained a month ago in an Israeli air strike. Hamas said Popplewell, whom it said was also a British citizen, was being detained with a woman hostage when the place they were ...