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Six people killed in small plane crash in California

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Six people killed in small plane crash in California

Six people were killed when the small plane they were aboard crashed in California early Saturday morning, officials said. 

The Cessna C550 business jet crashed at around 4:15 a.m. local time near the French Valley Airport in Murrieta, California in Riverside County. The craft was “down in a field” and “fully involved in fire,” the Riverside County Fire Department tweeted on Saturday. The fire burned “approximately one acre of vegetation” and was contained at about 5:35 a.m.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that all six passengers were pronounced dead at the scene. The passengers have not been identified. 

The plane took off from the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, the Federal Aviation Administration said. 

The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash. 

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This is the second crash in the area in less than a week. CBS Los Angeles reported that another Cessna crashed near the French Valley airport shortly before 2 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. One person was killed and three were injured. The person who died was 39-year-old Temecula resident Jared Newman, the father of the three surviving passengers, according to CBS Los Angeles. He was reportedly operating the aircraft under a training license, which is prohibited by federal regulations. 

This is a developing story and will be updated. 

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Theater Ceiling Collapses During ‘Captain America’ Screening in Washington State

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Theater Ceiling Collapses During ‘Captain America’ Screening in Washington State

Two people watching “Captain America: Brave New World” alone in a movie theater in Wenatchee, Wash., on Tuesday night began hearing strange creaking and moaning. In a film where an absurd amount of furniture is smashed, dramatic final breaths abound and fighters grunt through mortal combat, the sounds fit right in.

But at some point, perhaps during a quieter scene like when [redacted for spoilers], the moviegoers looked up and watched as part of the ceiling toward the front of the theater began to shift, according to Brian Brett, the chief of the Wenatchee Valley Fire Department, which responded to a collapse at Liberty Cinema a little after 8 p.m. local time.

“They started to move away from what was falling from the ceiling,” Chief Brett said in a phone call on Thursday. “A very large section of framed-in area underneath the roof came loose and dropped into about the first three rows of seats in the old historic theater.”

One of the viewers was “struck by some debris” but was not injured, and the other person avoided the debris altogether, Chief Brett said. The two viewers declined to be interviewed or identified.

Photographs from the scene showed plaster, drywall and pink insulation blanketing the front rows of the theater. Wires hung from the roof like streamers.

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The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear. The building is old, and asbestos might have been exposed by the collapse, Chief Brett said. Emergency responders wore full-face masks connected to air tanks to avoid breathing the air inside the theater, he added.

Liberty Cinema was closed indefinitely for inspections. It is managed by Sun Basin Theatres in Wenatchee, a city of about 35,000 people nestled between the foothills of the Cascade Range and the Columbia River, about 90 miles east of Seattle.

“This location is very near and dear to our hearts and it’s been a pleasure serving up popcorn to you all from this location over the decades,” Sun Basin Theatres said on Facebook. “That’s why we’re taking the time to properly sort this out.”

Chief Brett said he had not experienced something like this in the town’s history. He was glad the two moviegoers were OK and worried about what would have happened had the theater been more crowded.

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OpenAI reveals GPT-4.5 amid flurry of new AI model releases

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OpenAI reveals GPT-4.5 amid flurry of new AI model releases

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OpenAI has launched its largest artificial intelligence model with fewer “hallucinations”, the latest in a flurry of AI releases by US tech groups.

The San Francisco-based company on Thursday unveiled GPT-4.5, its long-awaited update to the technology that underpins its popular product ChatGPT. In early tests, its hallucination rate, where AI systems generate inaccurate information, was 37 per cent compared with nearly 60 per cent on its predecessor GPT-4o.

With GPT-4.5, OpenAI is continuing to bet on big, expensive large language models despite the advent of highly capable smaller products, such as Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s R1, which are open, cheaper and more accessible for developers.

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It comes as competition is growing within the fast-developing AI industry as tech groups have rushed to launch their latest models in recent weeks. Anthropic revealed its Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Monday, which followed last week’s launch of Grok 3, the latest model from Elon Musk’s xAI.

OpenAI in a blog post on Thursday said GPT-4.5 had “broader knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world, leading to reduced hallucinations and more reliability across a wide range of topics”.

“With every new order of magnitude of compute comes novel capabilities,” the company said, adding GPT-4.5 was “at the frontier of what is possible in unsupervised learning”.

OpenAI has been at the forefront of a global race to lead the AI industry, raising tens of billions from investors to fund bigger models with increased capabilities that require vast amounts of computing power.

It is in talks with SoftBank and other investors to raise up to $40bn at a valuation of $300bn, including the new money. Anthropic is also fundraising about $3.5bn at a $60bn-plus valuation, said two people with knowledge of that process.

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However, the huge costs of running larger models have led OpenAI to consider withdrawing developer access to GPT-4.5 amid fierce competition on pricing from rivals.

OpenAI said while a preview of GPT-4.5 will be made available to developers who pay to use OpenAI’s models through its application programming interface (API), this access could be revoked in the future.

AI groups largely generate revenue through paid API access and individual subscriptions. OpenAI said it will see how developers use the powerful model and whether it is worth offering to them considering the high cost of running it.

The company said: “GPT‐4.5 is a very large and compute-intensive model, making it more expensive than and not a replacement for GPT‐4o [its predecessor]. Because of this, we’re evaluating whether to continue serving it in the API long-term as we balance supporting current capabilities with building future models.”

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has previously said GPT-4 cost more than $100mn to train, and such costs are widely expected to increase as the size and capabilities of models scale and require more computing power to train and run.

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In a post on X after the announcement, Altman said the company was “out of GPUs”, the chips required to run and train AI systems.

“This isn’t how we want to operate, but it’s hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages,” he said, adding they expected to get more in the coming weeks.

He also highlighted GPT-4.5 was not focused on reasoning and would not beat industry benchmarks but it had “a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it I haven’t felt before”.

Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco and Melissa Heikkilä in London

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The CFPB drops its lawsuit against Capital One, marking a major reversal

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The CFPB drops its lawsuit against Capital One, marking a major reversal

Jonathan McKernan, nominee for Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, testifies before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday in Washington, D.C.

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Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday dropped five major legal cases it had underway — including a big lawsuit against Capital One — marking a major reversal for an agency that had pursued aggressive action against financial institutions accused of wrongdoing during the Biden administration.

Just last month, the CFPB had accused Capital One of failing to pay more than $2 billion in interest to customers by misleading them into thinking they would be getting higher rates. Capital One denied the charges.

The bureau also dropped its cases against Rocket Homes, Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, and Heights Finance Holding Company.

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News of the court filings dismissing the CFPB’s legal cases came just as the Senate Banking Committee was grilling President Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Jonathan McKernan.

The CFPB has faced intense turmoil in recent weeks, with over a hundred workers fired and the agency virtually shuttered after staff were told to stop all work. Employees were locked out of the bureau’s D.C. headquarters and the building’s lease was canceled.

People protest in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.

People protest in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.

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Jacquelyn Martin/AP/AP

During his Senate testimony, McKernan said the agency had overreached under the Biden administration,

“We’ve got to refocus it on its mission,” said McKernan, who was previously on the board of the FDIC. “We need to right-size it, make sure that we have an efficient CFPB and we need to reinstate some accountability to our elected officials.”

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Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who played a major role in the bureau’s founding after the 2008 financial crisis, said during the hearing that she did not believe that the timing of the court filings were coincidental, though she offered no evidence.

“It seems to me the timing of that announcement is designed to embarrass you and to show exactly who is in charge of this agency right now: Elon Musk and his little band of hackers,” she told McKernan.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said that she had asked McKernan about the pending litigation the day before and had been “assured” that he would “review these lawsuits.”

“This makes me question like who’s really going to be in charge of the CFPB if this is what’s happening while your nomination is being considered?,” she said.

“My question is, who’s going to be in charge here?” Smith asked McKernan.

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“Senator, if I’m confirmed, I’m the director,” he replied.

‘CFPB RIP’

The CFPB is currently led by acting director Russell Vought, the White House budget director and one of the architects of the conservative plan Project 2025.

The Trump administration has made clear its contempt for the bureau, and that it wants to either eliminate CFPB or drastically pare back its work. Musk has tweeted “CFPB RIP.”

Consumer groups decried the end of the litigation.

“Voters in the last election expressed their dismay with high prices, yet the Administration is stopping the essential work to stop corporate abuses that take billions from people every year,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center. “The cases dismissed today actually underscore why the CFPB’s work is so essential to investigate practices that are draining hard-earned money from the pockets of everyday people.”

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Before joining the FDIC’s Board of Directors, McKernan held staff roles in the Senate, the Treasury, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and spent a brief stint detailed to CFPB. He previously spent nine years as a lawyer focused on banking and consumer financial laws, according to his prepared testimony. Several business groups have endorsed McKernan’s nomination.

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