Top Stories — Sunday, September 7, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Air Canada Flight Attendants Overwhelmingly Reject Proposed Contract — nyt News
- Authorities Point to Cable Disconnecting in First Report on Lisbon Funicular Crash — nyt News
- Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction? — TechCrunch
Air Canada Flight Attendants Overwhelmingly Reject Proposed Contract
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/7/2025, 4:05:02 AM
About 10,000 flight attendants at Air Canada resoundingly rejected a proposed contract that was negotiated last month after they defied federal back-to-work orders.
The airline said it is not expecting a resumption, however, of the walkout that shut down Canada's main air carrier for five days last month.
Air Canada said in a statement that it and the union had anticipated that the contract might be rejected and reached an agreement not to restart the strike and lockout if that happened. Instead, talks on the wage portion of the contract will reopen with a mediator's help. If that fails, the issue will go to arbitration.
The shutdown affected about 500,000 passengers and paralyzed travel in a sparsely populated country that spans six time zones, leaving few practical alternatives to flying for many trips.
The Air Canada unit of the Canadian Union of Public Employees said in a statement on Saturday afternoon that the contract was rejected by 99.1 percent of the attendants. It added that 94.6 percent of them voted.
The union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Air Canada reopened talks with the union after its workers defied a labor board decision declaring the strike illegal. The resulting agreement included, for the first time at the airline, pay for work that flight attendants perform before and after flights, such as boarding passengers and conducting safety checks.
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Authorities Point to Cable Disconnecting in First Report on Lisbon Funicular Crash
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/7/2025, 3:50:46 AM
A preliminary report released Saturday on the deadly funicular accident in Lisbon found that a cable on the upper car had disconnected, and said investigators would be looking at that factor, among others, as they continued to try to understand what went wrong.
According to the report by Portuguese authorities, the cable connecting the two cars had failed at its attachment point on the upper car. Investigators found that though two braking systems were applied, neither one could stop the rapid descent of the car, which is estimated to have made impact at 60 kilometers per hour, or over 35 miles per hour. The report suggested that this was not surprising, however, because without the support of the connecting cable, the brakes alone "do not have sufficient capacity to stop the moving cabins."
The report, from the Portuguese aviation and rail accident investigative agency, did not explain how the cable broke free. From an initial review of the wreckage, authorities said, the remainder of connecting cable, including the attachment point on the other car, presented no anomalies. The report cautioned that no conclusions about the accident's cause could be made, and that another preliminary report would be released within 45 days.
The funicular, the Elevador da Glória, for years has taken commuters and tourists up and down a steep hill in Lisbon's center. It had two cars; one went up as the other went down, linked by a cable that ran through a pulley at the top of the hill.
On Wednesday evening, the car traveling uphill, which was close to the bottom of its route, halted suddenly and then fell backward, injuring some passengers. But the car going downhill went into free fall, jumping off the tracks and crashing against a building. Sixteen people were killed.
The victims included an American, two Canadians, five Portuguese and people from South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France and Ukraine, according to Portugal's judicial police. At least 21 survivors of the accident were injured, the authorities said.
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Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction?
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 9/7/2025, 3:00:22 AM
Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction?
On Friday, a startup called Fable announced an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles' classic film "The Magnificent Ambersons."
Why is a startup that bills itself as the "Netflix of AI," and that recently raised money from Amazon's Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942?
Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts — Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. In fact, it's already been used to create unauthorized "South Park" episodes.
Now Fable is launching a new AI model that can supposedly generate long, complex narratives. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose — who has already spent five years working to digitally reconstruct Welles' original vision — plans to use that model to remake the lost footage from "The Magnificent Ambersons."
Remarkably, Fable has not obtained the rights to the film, making this a prospective tech demo that will probably never be released to the general public.
Why "Ambersons"? If you're not a Welles-loving cinephile, I'm guessing it sounds like an obscure choice for digital resurrection.
Even among classic movie buffs, Welles' second film is overshadowed by its older, more famous sibling. While "Citizen Kane" is often called the greatest movie ever made, "Ambersons" is remembered as a lost masterpiece that the studio took out of the director's hands, dramatically cutting it down and adding an unconvincing happy ending.
That makes it even more astonishing that Fable apparently failed to reach out to Welles' estate. David Reeder, who handles the estate for Welles' daughter Beatrice, described the project to Variety as an "attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles' creative genius" and said that it will amount to nothing more than "a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking [of] a creative force like Welles."
Despite Reeder's criticism, he seems less upset by the idea of attempting to recreate "Ambersons" and more by the fact that the estate was not "even given the courtesy of a heads up." After all, he noted, "the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands."
I'm not so open-minded. Even if Welles' heirs were being consulted and compensated, I'd have zero interest in this new "Ambersons," just as I have zero interest in hearing a digital simulacrum of Welles's legendary voice being used to hawk new products.
Now, Welles fans know this isn't the first time other filmmakers have tried to posthumously fix or finish his movies. But at least those attempts used footage that Welles had shot himself. Fable, meanwhile, describes its planned approach as a hybrid of AI and traditional filmmaking — apparently some scenes will be reshot with contemporary actors whose faces will be then swapped for digital recreations of the original cast.
Despite the absurdity of announcing a project like this without the film rights or the blessing of Welles' daughter, at least Rose seems motivated by a genuine desire to honor Welles' vision. For example, in a statement about why he wants to recreate the film, Rose mourned the destruction of "a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," with only 50 seconds of the shot remaining in the recut film.
I share his sense of loss — but I also believe this is a tragedy that AI cannot undo.
No matter how convincingly Fable and Rose may be able to stitch together their own version of that tracking shot, it will be their shot, not Welles', filled with Frankensteined replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, not the actors themselves. Their final product will not be Welles' version of "The Magnificent Ambersons" that RKO destroyed more than 80 years ago. Barring a miraculous rediscovery of lost footage, that version is gone forever.
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