What does it cost an athlete to take a stand? From Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick to Azeez Al-Shaair and Naomi Osaka, athletes have spoken out on issues they believe in, sometimes at great personal and professional cost. Al Jazeera's Samantha Johnson explores the price athletes pay for their activism. Why did Africa boycott the 1966 World Cup? Why are World Cup tickets so expensive?

SoftBank's Son plans $50 billion Malaysia tech outlay, PM Anwar Ibrahim says Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, has reportedly picked regions in Malaysia for data centers and other projects. Masayoshi Son of SoftBank Group has tapped locations in Malaysia for $50 billion in technology investments, the country's prime minister said, an outlay that would accelerate the billionaire's global bet on AI infrastructure. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said he had a videoconference with Son last week, during which the Japanese tech investor said he had picked regions in the Southeast Asian country for projects including data centers. SoftBank representatives didn't immediately respond to a request for comment outside normal business hours. "He said he had chosen Sarawak -- Kuching -- and Peninsular Malaysia to expand investment in what would be among the largest investments in the region, worth $50 billion," Anwar said in a speech in Malacca on Saturday.

SoftBank's Masayoshi Son has rare cautionary note on AI safety SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son said AI can become super dangerous" during an event on the sidelines of the Science and Technology in Society Forum in Kyoto on Sunday. SoftBank Group chief Masayoshi Son -- one of AI's fervent believers -- said that even he's worried about safety risks as machines quickly gain more abilities. An exponential surge in AI capabilities makes it imperative for countries to build trust so that they can harness the technology together, Son said at an event on the sidelines of the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto on Sunday. He was speaking alongside White House science and tech policy advisor Michael Kratsios. "We don't have any more luxury of having human fight against human," Son said, adding that countries need to work together to control the far greater threat from powerful AI models.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. What you need to know before buying and using an eSIM on your next trip. Landing in Japan without mobile data can make a long travel day much harder than it needs to be. The minute you arrive you'll likely rely on your phone for train routes, maps, translation, reservations, and messages, so it's best to sort out getting connected before your flight. I've lived in Japan for nearly a decade, both in cities and the countryside, and I've used several different ways to stay connected. These days, I've found an eSIM to be the easiest option. But there are a few things worth checking before you buy one.

The robots -- one modeled after a rockhopper penguin and the other after a gentoo penguin -- are exhibited among real penguins at the theme park, the world's only facility to house 10 species of penguins. Visitors looked amazed to see one of the robots deftly move its flippers to change direction and dive deeper into the water as it swam next to real Humboldt penguins. "I thought it was real," one visitor said. The robots were created by Ikuma Okada, the 34-year-old leader of a group within the Adventure World operator. The robot penguins were created by Ikuma Okada, the 34-year-old leader of a group within the Adventure World operator.

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the, and ( 1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nations ( 2); much to their advantage, as robotics continues to be a vital pillar for ensuring Japan's economic resilience and future growth. Here, we discuss priorities and long-term agendas as presented in Japan's national robotics strategies. Although weather control is among Japan's lofty research goals for the next 25 years ( 3), geological disturbances remain inevitable. As such, disaster mitigation and response are high priorities that serve as motivation for robotics development in Japan ( 4).

An 18-year-old man has been arrested for his suspected involvement in a cyberattack on an internet cafe operator. An 18-year-old man has been arrested for his suspected involvement in a cyberattack on the operator of the Kaikatsu Club internet cafe chain, according to investigative sources. On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime countermeasure division arrested the company employee from Tokyo's Katsushika Ward, who was in the second year of high school at the time of the incident, on suspicion of fraudulent obstruction of business and violation of the law against unauthorized computer access. He has denied parts of the allegations, the sources said. In the cyberattack on the internet cafe chain operator Kaikatsu Frontier, a computer program that a high school boy from the city of Osaka developed using ChatGPT was used.

Such AI-generated content attracted approximately 335 million views on social media, resulting in financial losses estimated at ¥2 billion to ¥4.5 billion for celebrities and artists, according to the study. The estimated losses were calculated based on licensing fees related to using a person's likeness or voice, as well as the advertising value of view counts. However, the nonprofit added that the "actual financial losses might be significantly larger than the estimate," as the calculation only covered cases they were able to find. Only 1.1% of companies said they had guidelines on how to deal with these violations. Some 52% said they were "currently considering" options, while the rest had no plans as of date.

An artificial intelligence-equipped camera system shows a person trapped inside a railway crossing gate during a test by Kintetsu Railway. A growing number of Japanese railway operators are introducing artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems to help prevent accidents involving trains at level crossings. The technology can automatically detect and report abnormalities, such as stalled vehicles or people trapped on the tracks, enabling train drivers and other railway staff to respond more quickly. Industry officials view AI as an effective tool for improving crossing safety, while the government has started offering financial support to encourage wider adoption. Kintetsu Railway, based in the city of Osaka, has tested an AI-equipped camera system at a crossing on the Kyoto Line in the town of Seika, Kyoto Prefecture.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced numerous fields, their training on extensive multimodal datasets introduces significant privacy concerns, prompting the necessity for effective unlearning methods. However, current multimodal unlearning approaches often directly adapt techniques from unimodal contexts, largely overlooking the critical issue of modality alignment, i.e., consistently removing knowledge across both unimodal and multimodal settings. To close this gap, we introduce UMU-Bench, a unified benchmark specifically targeting modality misalignment in multimodal unlearning. UMU-Benchconsists of a meticulously curated dataset featuring 653 individual profiles, each described with both unimodal and multimodal knowledge. Additionally, novel tasks and evaluation metrics focusing on modality alignment are introduced, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of unimodal and multimodal unlearning effectiveness. Through extensive experimentation with state-of-the-art unlearning algorithms on UMU-Bench, we demonstrate prevalent modality misalignment issues in existing methods. These findings underscore the critical need for novel multimodal unlearning approaches explicitly considering modality alignment.