US Apple fans get hands on $3,500 Vision Pro

The new Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, 2023 in Cupertino, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Updated 02 February 2024
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US Apple fans get hands on $3,500 Vision Pro

  • Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing the Vision Pro

SAN FRANCISCO: US Apple stores on Friday will start selling the Vision Pro, the tech giant’s $3,499 headset and its first major release since the Apple Watch nine years ago.
Vision Pro’s release by the world’s most iconic device maker is a major milestone for the lovers of virtual or augmented reality, who see the technology as the next chapter in online life after the smartphone.
But with a high sticker price, and the middling success of similar and cheaper releases from Facebook owner Meta, early reviews are unconvincing that the Vision Pro will be a game-changer, at least initially.
The Vision Pro is an “astonishing” product, wrote The Verge, but “also represents a series of really big trade-offs” that are “impossible to ignore.”
It is “an impressive product, one that has been many years and billions of dollars in the making” but “even after trying it, I still have no idea whom or what this thing is supposed to be for,” wrote The New York Times.
Critics acknowledge a definite “wow” factor, noting its state-of-the-art image and the joy of opening and closing apps floating in space with your eyes and fingers.
However, the headset is heavy, messes up the user’s hair and requires a clunky battery pack, they add.
In a big promotional push, Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing the Vision Pro.
He drew criticism at a conference in June when he revealed the device without ever trying it on.
Apple refers to the Vision Pro as its first foray into “spatial computing,” refusing the term virtual reality, which is typically associated with tech geeks and gamers.
In ads, in addition to streaming movies, users are shown wearing the Vision Pro to work or chat with friends or toggle through apps.
Apple says there are 600 specifically designed apps and games available for the Vision Pro alongside one million compatible apps.
“These incredible apps will change how we experience entertainment, music, and games,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations.
Disney has partnered with Apple and will provide 150 3D movies at launch, the companies said.
Netflix, Spotify and Google for now have declined to modify their apps specifically for the headset.
The Vision Pro can be tested out by appointment in US Apple stores. That is because the device requires finely-tuned adjustments and some training as “most consumers don’t have experience with gesture controls,” Forrester Research wrote in a note.
According to analysts from Wedbush Securities, pre-orders have been strong and Apple should expect to sell about 600,000 units this year.
“For Apple the ultimate goal in our opinion is that Vision Pro will work alongside the iPhone and other Apple devices over the coming years,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush.


Polar bear biopsies to shed light on Arctic pollutants

Updated 21 May 2025
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Polar bear biopsies to shed light on Arctic pollutants

  • The expedition came at a time when the Arctic region was warming at four times the global average

NORWAY: With one foot braced on the helicopter’s landing skid, a veterinarian lifted his air rifle, took aim and fired a tranquilizer dart at a polar bear.
The predator bolted but soon slumped into the snowdrifts, its broad frame motionless beneath the Arctic sky.
The dramatic pursuit formed part of a pioneering research mission in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where scientists, for the first time, took fat tissue biopsies from polar bears to study the impact of pollutants on their health.
The expedition came at a time when the Arctic region was warming at four times the global average, putting mounting pressure on the iconic predators as their sea-ice habitat shrank.
“The idea is to show as accurately as possible how the bears live in the wild — but in a lab,” Laura Pirard, a Belgian toxicologist, told AFP.
“To do this, we take their (fatty) tissue, cut it in very thin slices and expose it to the stresses they face, in other words pollutants and stress hormones,” said Pirard, who developed the method.
Moments after the bear collapsed, the chopper circled back and landed. Researchers spilled out, boots crunching on the snow.
One knelt by the bear’s flank, cutting thin strips of fatty tissue. Another drew blood.
Each sample was sealed and labelled before the bear was fitted with a satellite collar.
Scientists said that while the study monitors all the bears, only females were tracked with GPS collars as their necks are smaller than their heads — unlike males, who cannot keep a collar on for more than a few minutes.
For the scientists aboard the Norwegian Polar Institute’s research vessel Kronprins Haakon, these fleeting encounters were the culmination of months of planning and decades of Arctic fieldwork.
In a makeshift lab on the icebreaker, samples remained usable for several days, subjected to controlled doses of pollutants and hormones before being frozen for further analysis back on land.
Each tissue fragment gave Pirard and her colleagues insight into the health of an animal that spent much of its life on sea ice.
Analysis of the fat samples showed that the main pollutants present were per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — synthetic chemicals used in industry and consumer goods that linger in the environment for decades.
Despite years of exposure, Svalbard’s polar bears showed no signs of emaciation or ill health, according to the team.
The local population has remained stable or even increased slightly, unlike parts of Canada, where the Western Hudson Bay group declined by 27 percent between 2016 and 2021, from 842 to 618 bears, according to a government aerial survey.
Other populations in the Canadian Arctic, including the Southern Beaufort Sea, have also shown long-term declines linked to reduced prey access and longer ice-free seasons.
Scientists estimate there are around 300 polar bears in the Svalbard archipelago and roughly 2,000 in the broader region stretching from the North Pole to the Barents Sea.
The team found no direct link between sea ice loss and higher concentrations of pollutants in Svalbard’s bears. Instead, differences in pollutant levels came down to the bears’ diet.
Two types of bears — sedentary and pelagic — feed on different prey, leading to different chemicals building up in their bodies.
With reduced sea ice, the bears’ diets have already started shifting, researchers said. These behavioral adaptations appeared to help maintain the population’s health.
“They still hunt seals but they also take reindeer (and) eggs. They even eat grass (seaweed), even though that has no energy for them,” Jon Aars, the head of the Svalbard polar bear program, told AFP.
“If they have very little sea ice, they necessarily need to be on land,” he said, adding that they spend “much more time on land than they used to... 20 or 30 years ago.”
This season alone, Aars and his team of marine toxicologists and spatial behavior experts captured 53 bears, fitted 17 satellite collars, and tracked 10 mothers with cubs or yearlings.
“We had a good season,” Aars said.
The team’s innovations go beyond biopsies. Last year, they attached small “health log” cylinders to five females, recording their pulse and temperature.
Combined with GPS data, the devices offer a detailed record of how the bears roam, how they rest and what they endure.
Polar bears were once hunted freely across Svalbard but since an international protection agreement in 1976, the population here has slowly recovered.
The team’s findings may help explain how the bears’ world is changing, and at an alarming rate.
As the light faded and the icebreaker’s engines hummed against the vast silence, the team packed away their tools, leaving the Arctic wilderness to its inhabitants.


Fortnite video game returns to iPhone app store in US, ending exile imposed by Apple

Updated 21 May 2025
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Fortnite video game returns to iPhone app store in US, ending exile imposed by Apple

  • The legal wrangling is all part of a bitter feud that is still boiling

The popular video game Fortnite has returned to the iPhone app store in the US, ending a prolonged exile that was triggered by a legal showdown over the lucrative fees that Apple had been collecting for years through a payment system that it has been forced to change.
Fortnite hailed its app’s long-awaited restoration to the iPhone and iPad in a Tuesday pos t, marking the first time it will be available on those devices since it was ousted in 2020 for trying to avoid the 15 percent to 30 percent commissions that Apple collects on in-app transactions.
The video game featuring a virtual fight on a digital island is coming back to the iPhone just a few days after its parent company, Epic Games, filed a motion asking a federal judge to order its return as part of a civil contempt of court finding issued against Apple late last month.
In a brief statement filed in court late Tuesday, Apple said the dispute that had been keeping Fortnite off its iOS software for the iPhone had been resolved. The Cupertino, California, company didn’t immediately respond to a request for further comment.
The legal wrangling is all part of a bitter feud that is still boiling.
Epic filed a lawsuit alleging Apple had turned its app store into an illegal monopoly — a claim that it lost under a 2021 ruling made by a federal judge after a month-long trial.
Although she decided Apple wasn’t breaking antitrust laws, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the company to loosen control over in-app payments and allow links to other options that might offer lower prices.
After exhausting an appeal that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, Apple last year introduced a new system that opened the door for links to alternative payment options while still imposing a 27 percent commission on in-app transactions executed outside its own system.
Epic fired back by alleging Apple was thumbing its nose at the legal system, reviving another round of court hearings that lasted nearly a year before Gonzalez Rogers delivered her stinging rebuke that included a ban on collecting any kind of commission on alternative payment options.
That appeared to clear the way for Fortnite’s return to the iPhone and iPad, but Epic last week said the video game was still being blocked by Apple. After Apple contended that keeping Fortnite was still permissible while it pursues an appeal of Gonzalez Rogers’ contempt ruling, Epic forced the issue by asking the judge for another order that would make clear the video game should be allowed back on the iPhone and iPad.
Gonzalez Rogers on Monday asked why Apple was still blocking Fortnite without an order from the appeals court authorizing that action. She scheduled a May 27 hearing in Oakland, California, to hear Epic’s latest motion while noting “Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing.”


Gazan twins in Cannes warn ‘nothing left’ of homeland

Updated 20 May 2025
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Gazan twins in Cannes warn ‘nothing left’ of homeland

CANNES: Twin Gazan filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser said they never thought the title of their new film “Once Upon A Time In Gaza” would have such heartbreaking resonance.
“Right now there is nothing left of Gaza,” said Tarzan when it premiered on Monday at the Cannes film festival.
Since militants from Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, more than 18 months of Israeli bombardment has ravaged large swathes of the Palestinian territory and killed tens of thousands of people.
Israel has vowed to “take control of all” the besieged territory of more than two million inhabitants, where United Nations agencies have warned of famine following Israel’s two-month total blockade.
Israel allowed in several aid trucks on Monday but the UN said it was only “a drop in the ocean” of needs.
The Nasser brothers, who left Gaza in 2012, said their new film set in 2007, when Hamas Islamists seized control of the strip, explains the lead-up to today’s catastrophic war.
“Once Upon A Time In Gaza,” which screened in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section, follows friends Yahia and Osama as they try to make a little extra cash by selling drugs stuffed into falafel sandwiches.
Using a manual meat grinder that does not rely on rare electricity, student Yahia blends up fava beans and fresh herbs to make the patty-shaped fritters in the back of Osama’s small run-down eatery, while dreaming of being able to leave the Israeli-blockaded coastal strip.
Charismatic hustler Osama meanwhile visits pharmacy after pharmacy to amass as many pills as he can with stolen prescriptions, pursued by a corrupt cop.


Israel first imposed a blockade on Gaza in June 2006 after militants there took one of its soldiers, and reinforced it in September 2007 several months after Hamas took power.
“The blockade was gradually tightened, tightened until reaching the genocide we see today,” said Tarzan.
“Until today they are counting the calories that enter,” he added.
An Israeli NGO said in 2012 that documents showed Israeli authorities had calculated that 2,279 calories per person per day was deemed sufficient to prevent malnutrition in Gaza.
The defense ministry however claimed it had “never counted calories” when allowing aid in.
Despite all this, Gazans have always shown a love of life and been incredibly resilient, the directors said.
“My father is until now in northern Gaza,” Tarzan said, explaining the family’s two homes had been destroyed.
But before then, “every time a missile hit, damaging a wall or window, he’d fix it up the next day,” he said.
In films, “the last thing I want to do is talk about Israel and what it’s doing,” he added.
“Human beings are more important — who they are, how they’re living and adapting to this really tough reality.”
In their previous films, the Nasser twins followed an elderly fisherman enamoured with his neighbor in the market in “Gaza Mon Amour” and filmed women trapped at the hairdresser’s in their 2015’s “Degrade.”
Like “Once Upon A Time in Gaza,” they were all shot in Jordan.

As the siege takes its toll in “Once Upon A Time In Gaza,” a desolate Yahia is recruited to star in a Hamas propaganda film.
In Gaza, “we don’t have special effects but we do have live bullets,” the producer says in one scene.
Arab said, long before Gazan tap water became salty and US President Donald Trump sparked controversy by saying he wanted to turn their land into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” the coastal strip was a happy place.
“I remember when I was little, Gaza actually was a riviera. It was the most beautiful place. I can still taste the fresh water on my tongue,” he said.
“Now Trump comes up with this great invention that he wants to turn it into a riviera after Israel completely destroyed it?“
Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, 57 of whom remain in Gaza including 34 the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 53,486 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health authorities, whose figures the United Nations deems reliable.
Gaza health authorities said at least 44 people were killed there in the early hours of Tuesday.


Rapper Werenoi, France’s biggest-selling music artist in recent years, dies at age 31

Updated 18 May 2025
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Rapper Werenoi, France’s biggest-selling music artist in recent years, dies at age 31

PARIS: Rapper Werenoi, France’s biggest-selling music artist in recent years, has died at the age of 31, his producer and record company said.
The artist, whose real name was Jérémy Bana Owona, was the number 1 album seller in France in 2023 and 2024 according to the ranking of the National Union of Phonographic Industry, which includes in-store and e-commerce sales as well as plays on streaming services.
“It’s with immense sadness that we’ve learned of Werenoi’s passing,” his record company Believe said on Instagram. “All our thoughts are with his family, loved ones, his team and everyone who knew him.”
“Rest in peace my brother, I love you,” his producer Babs posted on X.
French media report Werenoi died early Saturday in a Paris hospital. The cause of his death has not been made public.
Werenoi first became known to the French public in 2021 when he posted his song “Guadalajara” on YouTube and it was viewed hundreds of thousand times.
He released three albums, “Carré” in 2023, “Pyramide” the next year and “Diamant Noir” last month, making him one of the biggest names in French rap.
Several French rappers posted tributes on social media. French-Malian pop star Aya Nakamura, who featured on his second album, wrote : “Rest in peace my dude. A news that saddens me and courage to the loved ones especially.”
“He made a difference for the quality of his songs, his melodies and his punchlines,” singer Pascal Obispo, who had accompanied Werenoi on the piano at a 2023 Paris concert, told French newspaper Le Parisien.


Adidas, Puma family feud to be turned into TV series

Updated 18 May 2025
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Adidas, Puma family feud to be turned into TV series

CANNES: The bitter brotherly feud that sparked the creation of sports-shoe brands Adidas and Puma in the same small German town in the 1940s is to be turned into a television series with the help of family archives, its producers announced Sunday.
Hollywood-based film producer No Fat Ego is backing the project, which has the blessing of the family behind the Adidas empire founded by Adolf “Adi” Dassler.
It will delve into one of the most fascinating fraternal blow-ups in corporate history, which pitted Adi against his brother Rudolf (“Rudi“) who went on to create rival Puma.
The two men jointly ran a family-owned footwear company before falling out during World War II, with their post-conflict animus splitting their town of Herzogenaurach to this day.
Scriptwriter Mark Williams, behind the hit Netflix series “Ozark,” has been hired to lead the project and is currently going through Dassler family home videos and memorabilia to work on the story.
“Everybody knows the brands, but the story behind them is something we don’t really fully know,” Williams told AFP at the Cannes film festival.
One of the most sensitive areas — particularly for the reputations of the multi-billion-dollar footwear companies today — will be how the brothers are portrayed during the war period.
Both became members of the Nazi party in the 1930s, as was customary for the business elite at the time.
Rudi went to fight, however, and was arrested by Allied forces on his return to a defeated Germany.
“Adi stayed home and tried to keep the company alive,” Williams added.
Their factory was seized as part of the war effort and converted into a munitions plant.
The series promises to be a “Succession-type drama between the family” set over several generations, Williams explained, comparing it to the earlier hit HBO series.


The head of No Fat Ego, Niels Juul, who has produced Martin Scorsese’s most recent movies, said he was originally drawn to the story after learning about Adidas’s collaboration with legendary black American runner Jesse Owens.
Partly thanks to Adidas’s innovative spiked shoes, Owens became one of the stars of the 1936 Berlin Olympics which Hitler had hoped would showcase white German supremacy.
No Fat Ego intends to develop the series with full editorial independence before offering it to streaming platforms.
“We want to have the creative control, and Mark has to have absolute silence and quiet to do what he does,” Juul told AFP.