Features

ANAHEIM, United States — Disney lifted the lid on “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and presented new footage from “Star Wars” and Pixar movies at a giant showcase in front of 12,000 fans in California on Friday.

“Avatar” director James Cameron took the stage at the company’s biennial D23 fan gathering to announce the name of the latest installment of his sci-fi franchise, due out December 2025.

“The new film is not what you expect. But it’s definitely what you want,” teased Cameron of his third visit to Pandora.

The previous two “Avatar” films are the highest and third-highest grossing movies of all time, earning $5.2 billion combined.

Images from the new movie, currently in production in New Zealand, showed its blue Na’vi characters dancing around a campfire, as well as images of giant floating ships and flying beasts.

The director promised higher emotional stakes, and “new cultures and settings and creatures and new biomes”.

“You’ll see a lot more Pandora, the planet, that you never saw before,” he said.

The fourth and fifth “Avatar” films are scheduled for 2029 and 2031.

Also in Friday’s presentation, Disney fans saw a first glimpse of “The Mandalorian and Grogu”.

Out in May 2026, it will be the first “Star Wars” film since 2019’s divisive “The Rise of Skywalker”.

Disney, which had been churning out a new “Star Wars” film every year to that point, dramatically slammed the brakes in the face of diminishing box office returns.

“We’re putting ‘Star Wars’ back on the big screen,’” said Dave Filoni, producer of the new movie — which is spun off from streaming series “The Mandalorian,” and will feature its beloved Baby Yoda.

Footage showed the cutesy creature and his mercenary friend speeding around a snowy planet.

On the television side, Jude Law plays a Jedi in “Skeleton Crew”.

The kid-centric show is “in the spirit of... coming-of-age films of the ‘80s like ‘The Goonies’ and ‘E.T.,’” promised Law.

‘Who else?’ 

The giant D23 fan gathering caters to and showcases the obsessive loyalty of Disney’s most die-hard devotees.

Every two years, thousands flock to a California convention centre, dressed as their favorite princesses and heroes.

Tickets — ranging from $80 to an eye-watering $2,600 VIP pass — allow attendees to spend yet more money on rare merchandise, and watch starry presentations unveiling new films, shows and theme park rides.

“Who else but Disney could pull off a weekend like D23, right?” CEO Bob Iger asked the packed crowd at Anaheim’s NHL professional ice hockey arena, to cheers.

Seconds later, the suited executive was replaced on stage by a troupe of hula-ing Polynesian dancers and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, promoting “Moana 2”.

But beneath the euphoria, Friday night’s presentation of new movies and TV shows comes at a key time for Disney.

The company’s Pixar and Marvel franchises have suffered uncharacteristically poor runs in recent years, with high-profile flops like “Lightyear” and “The Marvels”.

Disney’s stock price remains well below half its 2021 peak. Rounds of cost-cutting have seen thousands of jobs cut since last year, mirroring trends across Hollywood.

This summer has brought welcome relief, with monster hits “Deadpool & Wolverine”, and “Inside Out 2” — already the biggest animated film of all time.

‘Toy meets tech’ 

Pixar on Friday announced “Hoppers”, a new animated movie about a young girl who can “hop” her brain into a robotic beaver.

Out in spring 2026, it will follow her undercover adventures into the animal world, where she befriends a “regal beaver” called King George, and helps battle an evil mayor voiced by Jon Hamm.

And Pixar’s “Toy Story 5”, out a few months later, will see the beloved toys vie with electronic devices like phones and tablets for children’s attention.

“This time around, it’s toy meets tech,” said director Andrew Stanton.

ISTANBUL — Turkey has blocked the online game Roblox, which is popular among teenagers, a week after it froze access to Instagram following censorship accusations against the tech giant.

The move late Wednesday comes amid a growing codemnation of social media by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has accused online platforms of “fascism” and failing to remove posts the authorities deem offensive.

Roblox, a platform that allows players to create their own games, has been downloaded more than 41 million times in Turkey since its launch in 2015.

Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said Roblox had been suspended because “it contains content that will cause abuse of children”. Prosecutors in Adana are investigating Roblox.

Instagram access has been blocked in Turkey since Friday.

The US-owned platform responded to the government’s accusations by saying it had taken down more than 2,500 posts at its request in the first six months of the year.

Erdogan on Monday said social network platforms “cannot even tolerate photos of Palestinian martyrs without immediately banning them”. His communications chief added that Instagram prevented posting condolence messages over the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Turkey may continue a social media crackdown as the head of a parliamentary digital platform commission, Huseyin Yayman, said there had been calls to block Tiktok.

“People who see me on the street stop me to tell me: ‘You will go to paradise if you shut down Tiktok’,” Yayman told news agency DHA.

Istanbul’s mayor and oppposition politician Ekrem Imamoglu slammed the authorities’ move, calling it “inconceivable”.

“Those who make these decisions are ignorant about the new world, the economy and technology,” Imamoglu wrote on the X social media platform.

LONDON — One goat, two elephants, and now three monkeys: British street artist Banksy thrilled fans in London on Wednesday by installing his third new artwork in three days.

The animal-themed collection has sparked speculation about their message. Are they criticism of England’s far-right riots or possibly support for Palestinians? Perhaps they reference global warming or even the Olympics?

As usual, the enigmatic artist gave no explanation when he claimed them on Instagram.

What is unusual is how quickly they have appeared — usually Banksy’s works are spaced several months apart.

On Monday, a depiction of a goat precariously perched on top of a wall with rocks tumbling down appeared in Richmond, southwest London.

“I think it’s actually a mountain gazelle from Palestine. So I think that work has to do with Palestine,” Daniel Lloyd-Morgan, a 60-year-old artist told AFP.

Then on Tuesday two elephant silhouettes with their trunks stretched towards each other appeared in Chelsea, southwest London.

On Wednesday, the black silhouette of three monkeys appeared on the side of a railway bridge as if they were swinging.

“Banksy is trying to get us to think and reflect about the ecological crisis that really threatens humanity,” university Professor Fawaz Gerges told AFP as he admired the latest work.

“His focus seems to be on animals, on trees, on oceans and it’s an overarching theme of his in the past few months,” he added.

The artworks have appeared at a time when England is gripped by violent far-right, anti-immigrant protests over the murder of three girls. Demonstrators have targeted hotels housing asylum seekers.

Banksy, whose identity is unknown, has repeatedly shown sympathy for the plight of refugees.

At the Glastonbury music festival last month the artist launched an inflatable boat over crowds depicting dummy migrants wearing life vests.


PARIS — When academic Jathan Sadowski reached for an analogy last year to describe how AI programs decay, he landed on the term "Habsburg AI".

The Habsburgs were one of Europe's most powerful royal houses, but entire sections of their family line collapsed after centuries of inbreeding.

Recent studies have shown how AI programmes underpinning products like ChatGPT go through a similar collapse when they are repeatedly fed their own data.

"I think the term Habsburg AI has aged very well," Sadowski told AFP, saying his coinage had "only become more relevant for how we think about AI systems".

The ultimate concern is that AI-generated content could take over the web, which could in turn render chatbots and image generators useless and throw a trillion-dollar industry into a tailspin.

But other experts argue that the problem is overstated, or can be fixed.

And many companies are enthusiastic about using what they call synthetic data to train AI programmes. This artificially generated data is used to augment or replace real-world data. It is cheaper than human-created content but more predictable.

"The open question for researchers and companies building AI systems is: how much synthetic data is too much," said Sadowski, lecturer in emerging technologies at Australia's Monash University.

'Mad cow disease' 

Training AI programs, known in the industry as large language models (LLMs), involves scraping vast quantities of text or images from the Internet.

This information is broken into trillions of tiny machine-readable chunks, known as tokens.

When asked a question, a programme like ChatGPT selects and assembles tokens in a way that its training data tells it is the most likely sequence to fit with the query.

But even the best AI tools generate falsehoods and nonsense, and critics have long expressed concern about what would happen if a model was fed on its own outputs.

In late July, a paper in the journal Nature titled "AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data" proved a lightning rod for discussion.

The authors described how models quickly discarded rarer elements in their original dataset and, as Nature reported, outputs degenerated into "gibberish".

A week later, researchers from Rice and Stanford universities published a paper titled "Self-consuming generative models go MAD" that reached a similar conclusion.

They tested image-generating AI programmes and showed that outputs become more generic and strafed with undesirable elements as they added AI-generated data to the underlying model.

They labelled model collapse "Model Autophagy Disorder" (MAD) and compared it to mad cow disease, a fatal illness caused by feeding the remnants of dead cows to other cows.

'Doomsday scenario' 

These researchers worry that AI-generated text, images and video are clearing the web of usable human-made data.

"One doomsday scenario is that if left uncontrolled for many generations, MAD could poison the data quality and diversity of the entire internet," one of the Rice University authors, Richard Baraniuk, said in a statement.

However, industry figures are unfazed.

Anthropic and Hugging Face, two leaders in the field who pride themselves on taking an ethical approach to the technology, both told AFP they used AI-generated data to fine-tune or filter their datasets.

Anton Lozhkov, machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, said the Nature paper gave an interesting theoretical perspective but its disaster scenario was not realistic.

"Training on multiple rounds of synthetic data is simply not done in reality," he said.

However, he said researchers were just as frustrated as everyone else with the state of the Internet.

"A large part of the internet is trash," he said, adding that Hugging Face already made huge efforts to clean data -- sometimes jettisoning as much as 90 per cent.

He hoped that web users would help clear up the internet by simply not engaging with generated content.

"I strongly believe that humans will see the effects and catch generated data way before models will," he said.

By Rania Sa’adi,
Rapid Transformational Therapist & Clinaicl Hypnotherapist

We have been hearing a lot about Emotional Intelligence (EQ), and how important it is to have it or increase it, in order to have better and healthier relationships with people around us, resulting in a better quality of life.

But what does it really mean to be emotionally intelligent, and how can we acquire it?

Emotional Intelligence is the skill and ability to understand our emotions, in order to be able to regulate them.

 Persons who are emotionally intelligent are always in tune with their feelings. This person is also known for having high levels of empathy.

This also helps you understand other people’s feelings by putting yourself in their shoes.

 So, on top of being connected to yourself, you are also more connected to others resulting in stronger and healthier bonds.

Emptying pent up emotions

Most people find it difficult to understand and connect with their negative emotions like anger, sadness, or guilt.

These emotions are very uncomfortable to sit with and most people will take the easy way out by distracting, avoiding or numbing these feelings.

What happens over the years is that all of these pent up feelings are trapped in body, not knowing where to go.

They end up showing up in the form of physical symptoms, like migraines, ulcers, irritable colon, or bladder and cancer. And this is where emotional

Emptying pent up emotions… protects you from… physical and mental health issues

intelligence becomes handy; it helps you understand and acknowledge these feelings inside you— it also helps you to let go of them.

Thus, emptying pent up emotions as they come along protects you from future physical and mental health issues.

How? By using the “Triple A” formula we can empty our pent up emotions. Here’s how

1. Acknowledge: Name the feeling, admit it is there and allow it to be

2. Accept: Accept that it is okay to have this feeling, even if it is a negative one.

Say it to yourself: “it is ok to be mad, sad or even jealous.

These are perfectly normal human feelings, and there is nothing wrong with having them.”

3. Articulate: Repeat to yourself: “ I feel angry because….” , “ I feel anxious because…” and let the rest come out from within you.

Acknowledging, accepting and understanding why we have these emotions, is key to letting go.

Emotions We are born with five core emotions.

They are: Fear, anger, guilt, hurt and sadness.

And every emotion has a message and a reason.

By understanding why it is there (articulating) can help us get rid of that negative feeling. Here are a few examples on how to do this:

Fear is usually there to protect us, a message in the stressed person’s mind that goes as follows: “If I am always aware, alert of everything happening around me. I will be prepared for bad things when they happen, and therefore I can handle it better.”

Truth is, fear cripples us and prevents anyone from handling anything at all.

Understanding this helps us take control of that emotion and ultimately reduce it in our system.

Anger usually is born when someone feels unseen, unheard and therefore not important or valued enough.

This is when anger starts to creep into someone’s system, as a coping mechanism. It is the solution that the subconscious mind presents to assert a person’s presence, validate one’s existence and ensure that you are seen and heard.

Guilt can be found in the “people pleaser”. One may wish to make everyone happy and thus making oneself responsible for it.

Since this signs you up for “mission impossible” you have set yourself up for failure. When this happens, you feel down and disappointed.

Guilt will serve as the engine that keeps you stuck in that cycle.

These are just a few examples of how every emotion has a role and function in our lives. Once we accept and acknowledge these facts, we can move on to understanding the message behind the emotion, and let go of it.

Being in-tune with one’s feelings is key to increasing emotional intelligence

Being in-tune with one’s feelings is key to increasing emotional intelligence.

If you are well connected with your emotions, then you can sense and read others’ emotions as well, and thus connect with them on a deeper level, resulting in healthier and more flourishing relationships.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

SAN FRANCISCO — Google confirmed on Friday that it had pulled an ad for its Gemini artificial intelligence after it landed flat with some Olympics viewers.

The “Dear Sydney” ad, intended to tout capabilities of Gemini AI, featured a dad warmly describing how the tool wrote his daughter a fan letter from her to US hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

However, some viewers bashed the ad as promoting the notion that parents should coax their children to rely on AI rather than learn to express themselves.

“While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation,” a Google spokesperson told AFP.

Social media posts fired off on an array of platforms questioned whether the ad signaled a dystopian future in which human creativity atrophies due to AI.

Syracuse University Media Professor Shelly Palmer said the commercial suggested that a poorly worded prompt to a generative AI tool can express a person’s feeling better than they could themselves.

“This commercial showing somebody having a child use AI to write a fan letter to her hero sucks,” author Linda Holmes wrote in a post on BlueSky.

“Who wants an AI-written fan letter?”

Tech evangelists have touted the promised benefits of AI, but teachers, musicians, artists and others have accused its creators of training advanced computers to replace them.

Early this year, Apple had an ad stumble of its own with a commercial showing musical instruments, paint cans and other creative gear crushed and replaced by an iPad to the tune of a song titled “All I Ever Need Is You”.

PARIS — French taxi drivers on Thursday demanded government compensation for lost revenue during the Olympic Games as traffic disruptions and fewer regular clients weigh on demand.

In a letter to the transport ministry, taxi unions said that the Games had been “hugely disappointing” for the drivers of licensed taxis of which there are 20,000 in Paris alone.

“Demand is slowing and the entire profession is being prevented from simply doing their job because of these Games,” said the letter, seen by AFP.

The number of additional visitors drawn by the Olympics had failed to make up for “the impact of traffic restrictions, the closure of venues and the impact of usual customers staying away”, it said.

The unions demanded the creation of a “compensation fund” that they said should cover income lost for the seven-month period during which public spaces were being taken over for the Games.

Several venues in and around Paris, but also in Marseille were blocked off for several weeks before the Games started on July 26.

In response to the letter, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete said in a social media post that taxis and ride-hailing services would now be allowed to enter the so-called “red zones” around Olympics venues, which were previously off-limits for motor vehicles.

Now that the high-security opening ceremony was in the past, several safety measures had been lifted and traffic was becoming more fluid, the minister said.

The government has encouraged French residents to go on holiday or work remotely during the Games, further dampening demand and contributing to a sharp fall in business compared to the same period in 2023, the unions said.

Some drivers had seen their income fall by 40 or 50 per cent, they said.

Last month, trade groups said that Paris shops, restaurants, bars and clubs were facing an “unprecedented slump in business and footfall”, blaming in part the “heavy security measures” during the Games.

SAN FRANCISCO — Meta has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit accusing it of violating a Texas state privacy law with a feature for “tagging” friends in Facebook photos, according to a deal finalised on Tuesday.

Meta agreed to pay the money over five years to settle the claims accusing the social networking giant of unlawfully capturing biometric data of Facebook users in Texas.

The lawsuit said Meta did not get users’ permission before enabling its software to recognise and “tag” people in pictures, according to a court filing.

“I’m proud to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from an action brought by a single state,” State Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement, calling the settlement “historic”.

The lawsuit, filed in early 2022, was the first time Texas had gone to court to accuse a tech firm of violating its “Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act”, according to Paxton.

“We are pleased to resolve this matter and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers,” a Meta spokesperson told AFP, noting the settlement includes an agreement that there was no wrongdoing.

Meta rolled out the photo tagging feature in 2011, running facial recognition on photos uploaded to Facebook without asking users for consent, according to the suit.

LONDON — Tributes poured in on Sunday for Edna O’Brien, the radical Irish writer whose groundbreaking first novel “The Country Girls” was burned and banned in her native country, after her death at 93.

“She died peacefully on Saturday 27 July after a long illness,” said a statement from her publishers Faber Books posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris said the country had “lost an icon” and “a brave, gifted, dignified and magnetic person”.

“Most people would have stopped and hidden away with the misogyny she faced but Edna O’Brien kept working on her artistry and became one of modern Ireland’s most celebrated and honoured writers,” he said in a statement on social media.

“It is for all of us to reflect upon, and never forget, that to reach her potential Edna would leave Ireland and make London her home.”

Irish President Michael D. Higgins said he had learned of the death of his “dear friend” O’Brien with “great sorrow”.

She was “one of the outstanding writers of modern times” and “a fearless teller of truths”, he said in a statement.

He added: “While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication.”

Micheal Martin, former Irish premier and current foreign and defence minister, hailed O’Brien on X as a “pioneer, never afraid to push boundaries through her work” who helped “usher in a new era in literature and in modern Ireland”.

Culture Minister Catherine Martin described O’Brien as “a modernising force in Irish society who fearlessly advanced the cause of equality”.

The honours she eventually received from her native Ireland included the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018.

“The Country Girls” (1960), about the sexual initiation of rebellious Catholic girls, drawn from O’Brien’s childhood experiences, is now a marker in modern Irish literature for its breaking of social taboos.

“The novel, published in 1960, caused a bit of consternation. People were outraged,” O’Brien recalled in The Guardian in 2008.

“The few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest. I received anonymous letters, all malicious. Then it was banned,” she said.

O’Brien was born in 1930 into a strict Catholic farming family in west Ireland’s County Clare.

She was educated at a convent school and then in Dublin where she graduated with a pharmacist’s licence in 1950, around the time she was discovering a passion for Leo Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot.

In 2018, she won the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoured for having broken down “social barriers for women in Ireland and beyond”.

In 2021, France made her a Commander in the “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”, the nation’s highest cultural distinction.

She received France’s Prix Femina special prize in 2019, honouring the ensemble of her work.

Recalling the “chauvinist” reactions to her first novel, O’Brien said it was a “foretaste of judgements to come”.

“I had not at that time read Lord Byron’s maxim that a man should calculate on his powers of resistance before entering on a career of writing,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2008.

“I have since read it and must add that a woman embarking on a career of writing needs those powers one hundredfold.”