‘Toy Story 5’ bosses reveal if there will be a live-action movie
Toy Story 5‘s producer and director rejects the idea of a live-action Toy Story movie.
Lindsey Collins suggested Pixar is not interested in Disney doing a version of its animated intellectual property combining real-life actors and physical sets with Computer-Generated Imagery characters, as it did for The Lion King (2019), Lilo + Stitch (2025), Moana (2026), and others.
BAFTA asked Collins and Toy Story 5‘s director, Andrew Stanton, if a live-action Toy Story film is on the cards, but the pair were quick to shut down the concept.
She said, “Oh, God, no, I hope not. Please God, no. Don’t say that loudly! You know that Disney is going to be like [pulls silly face].”
“No. The answer is a hard no,” she confirmed.
Stanton added, “That’s like a hat on top of a hat. I hope not. A hard no.”
However, 69-year-old Tom Hanks, who has voiced Woody the Cowboy in all five Toy Story movies, thinks Disney could use artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the sheriff’s voice should Toy Story 6 be made.
He told Entertainment Weekly, “Time is undefeated. The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me. Every word we have ever recorded in time on Toy Story is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want.”
However, the two-time Oscar winner believes Toy Story 6 should only be made if it is “worthwhile.”
Hanks said, “If you’re gonna do another Toy Story, it better be worthwhile.”
“It better be great. You better be examining some theme that is not just dragging it out because people like the title. I mean, it is a huge corporate business without a doubt, I’m not gonna discount that. But unless it’s good, new, fresh, there’s no reason to do it at all,” he added.
Although Disney and Pixar have not confirmed Toy Story 6, it may be likely, as the fifth instalment had a strong performance at the box office in its opening weekend, grossing $312 million worldwide against its $250 million budget.
Israel reacted angrily over a new United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry report alleging the Jewish state had engaged in the “deliberate targeting of Palestinian children.”
Prior reports from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel garnered accusations of antisemitism and incitement to violence.
The latest report, released Wednesday, said that, “based on the evidence reviewed, and consistent with its previous reports, the Commission finds on reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and the Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
A woman kneels by a memorial site in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, southern Israel, as the community commemorates members killed, taken hostage, or who died in captivity following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.(Hannah McKay/Reuters)
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, told Fox News Digital that “this is not an investigative report. It is a political blood libel disguised as a U.N. document. This commission reaches its conclusions before examining the facts and repeatedly publishes reports that serve one purpose only: to vilify Israel. Instead of addressing Hamas’ crimes, the October 7 massacre, the hostages, and Hamas’ cynical use of children and civilians as human shields, the commission has once again chosen to place Israel in the dock.”
Danon added that “Israel will continue to defend its citizens and fight terrorism, regardless of how many false reports are published by fringe actors within U.N. institutions.”
Representatives from the COI and Human Rights Council did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment on the concerns addressed about the report.
Asked for a reaction from U.N. chief Antonio Guterres to the report, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, told Fox News Digital “it’s not his report to comment on.”
A bloodied handprint stains a wall inside a house in the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border after a Hamas attack days earlier.(Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Srinivasan Muralidhar, Chair of the Commission told reporters during a press briefing that, “The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.” He said “Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.”
Anne Bayefsky, President of Human Rights Voices and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told Fox News Digital that the COI’s “sham ‘inquiry’ makes the totally unjustified claim of legal authority, while at the same time systematically violating every conceivable legal rule of fairness, impartiality, and due process. Since its creation in 2021, every call for submissions, every consultation and every hearing held, has been contrived to take seriously the allegations of only one side – trashing literally millions of data points both historical and current to the contrary.”
She said, “the first COI report focused on children…fails to even mention the sickening murders of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas and 4-year-old Ariel Bibas.” She says that “also ignored in the COI report are the hundreds of thousands of Israeli children traumatized by October 7th, by the subsequent mass displacement, and by the excruciating longing for parents absent while defending their country against an inhumane foe.”
Photos of the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz, 84, who were kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and later killed, are displayed next to candles in the dining room in Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel, on Feb. 25, 2025, the day of Lifshitz’s funeral after their bodies were returned under a ceasefire agreement.(Amir Cohen/Reuters)
Bayefsky complained that though the current COI report “was produced weeks ago,” the COI members “deliberately withheld” the report when appearing to discuss it before the Human Rights Council last week. “They didn’t publish it until June 23, minutes prior to holding a stage-managed press conference designed to avoid accountability for their wild, unverified accusations,” she claimed.
Another member of the commission told reporters in Geneva that, “There can be no doubt in anyone who reads today’s report that every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children and they need to be held accountable.”
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks during a Security Council meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York on April 18, 2024.(Yuki Iwamura/AP)
Jonathan Conricus, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, told Fox News Digital that the latest report contains “no evidence to support any of the claims against Israel” and is filled with “inconsistencies in methodology.”
He said the report represents “an escalation, and it marks maybe the most severe attempt by the U.N. ecosystem to delegitimize Israel.”
Salo Aizenberg, director of media watchdog group HonestReporting, who has researched and debunked many of the claims made by those claiming genocide in Gaza, told Fox News Digital that the COI’s “report is built on a fictional battlefield where Hamas and [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] do not exist, and where hospitals are treated as purely civilian spaces despite extensive evidence of their military use and infiltration by Hamas operatives. It then accuses Israel of deliberately targeting children without producing a single incident supported by evidence of intent.”
Conricus said the report erases “Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the battlefield to create the false kind of perception that Israel was operating out of wanton aggression in a vacuum without there ever being a need for Israeli operations and this is a reoccurring theme.” He also noted that this report and others “use the statements of medical professionals as evidence, even when it’s way beyond their medical expertise, specifically when it comes to how wounds were inflicted.”
Beth Bailey writes on the United Nations, worldwide antisemitism, and regions in conflict for Fox News.
A sign displays the prices of unleaded gasoline and diesel fuel at a Chevron gas station in Bay Harbor Island, Florida, US, on Monday, June 22, 2026.
Zak Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Chevron Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner told CNBC on Thursday that the oil major expects U.S. gasoline prices to fall as the Middle East situation continues to normalize.
Responding to Trump’s criticism, Chevron’s Bonner said energy majors were “doing everything we can” to resolve the situation, but that it would take time for fuel prices to come down.
“What I would say is, we’re all concerned about prices. So, there is a lot of empathy, whether it’s in the U.S. or here in the U.K. or in Europe for consumers,” Bonner told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.
“It’s going to take time though. There is a lag between, you know, oil prices and reductions in oil prices and when that shows up at the pump, but we expect that prices will come down as things continue to normalize.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump named the likes of Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP and said gasoline prices “should be much lower at the pump.”
The U.S. president added that prices should be at $2.25 per gallon, “and we are higher than that.”
Asked whether the energy majors could do more to get gas prices down in the near term, Bonner replied: “Well, I think the majors are doing everything that we can. I’ll talk for Chevron, and we’re growing this year. We’re going to grow production at 7% to 10%.”
“We’ve optimized through the conflict and continue to optimize the levers that we have to deliver the energy the world needs and to deliver products to consumers,” she added.
Trump said Wednesday that he had ordered the Department of Justice (DoJ) to “immediately” start looking into the situation.
“The price of fuel is not only national security issue, it impacts the wallet of every American. We will always commit to ensuring affordability in this nation,” a DoJ spokesperson told CNBC by email.
South Africa, against all expectations, pulled off a 1-0 win against South Korea in Monterrey on Wednesday, gathering all three points they needed to advance to the round of 32 at the FIFA World Cup.
Bafana will face Canada in the next round, on June 28 in Los Angeles, thanks to Thapelo Maseko‘s second half strike, and the team’s renewed sense of energy and attacking flair, which had been missing against Mexico and Czechia,.
Before the match, South Africa head coach Hugo Broos answered the call from Bafana fans to start Orlando Pirates starboy Relebohile Mofokeng, which proved critical on the night (on the early hours in SA).
Mofokeng came off the bench in Bafana’s 1-1 draw against Czechia, and did not feature at all in the tournament opener against Mexico, which Bafana lost 2-0. Also handed a start was striker Evidence Makgopa, who proved a handful off the bench against Czechia too.
South Korea made the interesting call to leave superstar striker Son Heung Min on the bench, seemingly content with their passage into the round of 32, and this proved fatal.
Bafana started off as they had in the previous matches, sticking to the backfield and keeping Ronwen Williams busy with passes to the keeper.
Their first real chance came in the 7th minute, when Mofokeng found himself in the middle of the area and on the receiving end of a cross from Oswin Appollis, but his shot was deflected wide of goal.
The Koreans didn’t hang about and responded immediately, but Lee Kang In fired just wide, though Mbokazi was likely in the way had the ball gone slightly to the left.
Makgopa’s inclusion was also a revelation, as he very nearly came onto the end of a cross from Aubrey Modiba, but his glancing header went just wide of goal, as Bafana looked significantly more lively than in previous fixtures.
Bafana’s best chance came after the ‘hydration’ break in the 28th minute, when they made a superb team effort run up the field, and Maseko timed his shot beautifully… right at the goalkeeper. The rebound fell beautifully to Thalente Mbatha, who also shot it right at Kim from close range. Broos’s dismayed reaction on the sideline told the entire story.
By the time half time arrived, Bafana would have been disappointed to still be at 0-0, given their dominance across the half. But it was symptomatic of their recent struggles in front of goal, with scoring hard to come by since AFCON at the start of the year.
Credit had to go to Yaya Sithole, though. He was objectively bad against Mexico before being sent off, had to miss the Czechia match because of that red card, and took some heat from the fans. But he bounced back well, and was influential in the midfield in the absence of the suspended Teboho Mokoena.
Bafana’s efforts in the first half had an immediate impact on the South Korea bench, as they brought LAFC‘s Son on after the break, having seemingly assumed he wouldn’t be needed.
The Boys were right back into it though, as Maseko had another excellent chance on the 49th minute. A looping pass from the back landed at his feet and he did well to bring it down, but his delay in taking the shot, opting to get the ball onto his dominant left foot, cost him all the space he had. Broos was furious on the sidelines, once again.
His strong left foot finally paid off in the 63rd minute, when a nifty cut back and jink fooled the Korean defenders off newly subbed in Tshepang Moremi‘s pinpoint pass. It was Bafana’s first non-Penalty goal since 2010 at the World Cup, and the bench was in raptures.
A very long 20 minutes remained for Bafana fans, as Maseko was subbed off for Iqraam Rayners and South Korea pushed harder and harder. Bafana essentially parked the bus, which was risky given the time remaining.
Hearts were in mouths in the 93rd minute when Williams was called upon for his most pressing save yet, and a glancing header off a Castrop cross from Park landed right in his chest. After a quick surprised bobble he managed to save both the ball and South African tears.
Drew Barrymore reveals secret behind decades-long friendship with Cameron Diaz
Drew Barrymore has nothing but love for her longtime pal Cameron Diaz.
The 51-year-old actress and talk show host took to her Instagram account on Wednesday to share a heartfelt confession about her bond with Cameron.
In the candid post, Drew shared three snaps with Cameron with text over it sharing rare insight into their friendship that dates back to their teenage days.
On the first slide, Drew expressed her love for Cameron and revealed, “Cameron and I have been best friends since we were teenagers.”
In the second slide, featuring Drew and Cameron’s sweet selfie, as they beamed smiles, Drew wrote, “She’s been there for me in good and bad times.”
On the third slide, which showed another selfie of the duo while lying on a bed, Drew mentioned, “That’s my why.”
Drew added in the caption, “Hey @camerondiaz, I love you.”
She also encouraged her followers to show love to their loved ones and she noted in the caption, “Who has been there for you? Let’s show people the love they deserve!!”
Drew once talked about her decades-long friendship in an Instagram Live back in 2021, revealing they became friends when she was 14 and Cameron was 16.
”I was working at a coffee house and she was a junior model,” Drew recalled at the time. “She’s still my bestie and sistie—sistie? That’s a new word. It’s Cameron Diaz. We’re here to talk and we have things to talk about!”
”Cameron and I tend to text each other while we’re getting ready for things.
We send each other videos of ourselves from our closets of us getting dressed, dancing around and sharing information,” Drew shared. “That’s our form of communication.”
Meghan Markle has seemingly taken a big U-turn with her decision to join Prince Harry for a UK visit, but how she will be welcomed by Britons remains quite uncertain.
Since stepping back from royal duties and publicly attacking the royal family and UK lifestyle, the Duchess of Sussex is reportedly accompanying her husband and their two children, Archie and Lilibet, for a much-awaited return.
The family is set to take part in Invictus Games promotional events in mid-July. However, the confirmation is still pending.
Now, a royal expert, Ingrid Seward, believes that there are possibly two main reasons behind Meghan’s decision to make a UK comeback despite her years of ‘moaning.’
First, it is to end Prince Harry’s divorce rumours by supporting her partner. Secondly, to get the royal approval of her lifestyle brand, As Ever, in times of financial crisis.
The royal author claimed, “They need to come, or more accurately, Meghan needs to come. She really needs a bit of royal stardust sprinkled on her and her business if she wants it to succeed.
“She’s probably hoping a visit to the UK would give her that, so she has to make it work somehow.”
However, the Duchess is in crisis about thinking how Britons receive her, as they ‘rejected’ her before.
“It could be a very good move for her business, but it leaves her with a bit of a crisis because coming to a country where she is so disliked won’t be easy,” Ingrid said.
In truth it’s a bit more complicated, as a Häcken spokesperson told Reuters that the fee was more than the $1.5 million Orlando Pride paid to Tigres for the signing of Mexico playmaker Lizbeth Ovalle last August, yet FIFA documentation shows that London City Lionesses actually set a world record when they acquired the signature of France midfielder Grace Geyoro from Paris Saint-Germain for around $1.9 million in September.
Whatever the actual fee — which multiple Swedish sources have assigned as 15 million Swedish kronor (about $1.54 million) — Madrid have paid big money for a teenager who doesn’t have much experience, let alone at the top level. But her goal record is impressive.
Madrid are in desperate need of some firepower up front, as they look to compete with rivals Barcelona both in Liga F and the UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) and stole a march on Chelsea and others to do a deal for a player who has scored 52 goals in 74 games since breaking through in 2023.
So can Schröder help Madrid in their quest to reach the top?
Position
Primarily a central striker, Schröder often finds and attacks space early, and has versatility to play anywhere across the front line.
She likes to use her pace to slip in behind the opposition lines, while her movement in and around the box allows her to ghost in behind defenders and position herself perfectly for crosses, cutbacks and rebounds.
Strengths
The 19-year-old already has a phenomenal goal-scoring record and she is a fine finisher. Her stamina and excellent positioning enables her to consistently get into goal-scoring positions.
In 2025, she scored 30 times and assisted another 11 goals in the Swedish Damallsvenskan; she finished the season as the top scorer and was voted the best player in the league as well. On top of this, she scored eight goals in the inaugural UEFA Europa Cup, including a hat trick in the final against Hammarby.
In 2026, she already has seven goals to her name, and recently netted against Rosengard and Hammarby in back-to-back games.
Schröder is an explosive forward and a high-volume shot taker, with a proclivity to test the goalkeeper from any range. She has almost every finish in her repertoire, making her a threat from multiple situations, while one of her standout qualities is her ability to set up and shoot almost instantly.
She doesn’t overcomplicate things in the box, and is able to let a shot fly with minimal touches during a sequence, which doesn’t allow the goalkeeper time to react and often catches them off guard. She is able to generate tremendous power with minimal backlift, adding an element of surprise to her shots.
Things to work on
Schröder is still developing her physique and is quite diminutive in stature, as she stands only 5-foot-4 tall, which instantly puts her at a disadvantage in ground and especially aerial duels.
She can struggle with protecting possession under pressure and holding the ball high up the field. Indeed, her back-to-goal play in its current state needs a lot of work and limits her as a central striker target.
Her high volume of shots also has an underlying element of eagerness, which can translate into frustrating shot selection at times. Schröder will pounce on every opportunity to have a crack at goal, often picking up sub-optimal options, though this trait is likely to be ironed out by playing at a higher level more consistently.
Meanwhile, her 11 assists in 2025 belies her actual chance-creation ability. She isn’t a brilliant ball carrier who can beat an opponent on a whim, which limits her ability to influence play from certain situations, and is too reliant on the transition to work opportunities for her teammates; opportunities that will seldom come playing for better sides.
Who else was interested?
Chelsea held early interest in Schröder, especially after Khadija “Bunny” Shaw snubbed them to sign a new contract to stay at Manchester City. But they were not alone.
Her impressive goal record saw top European clubs — which sources told ESPN included Barcelona, OL Lyonnes, Bayern Munich and City — make offers to sign her, while some also arrived from clubs in the NWSL.
Chelsea, who played most of the 2025-26 campaign without a main striker due to injuries, offered a fee of more than $1 million and appeared to be leading the race to sign the 19-year-old before the deal collapsed, with Madrid able to offer her more certain game time following Caroline Weir‘s departure.
The Blues are still in the market to sign a pacey center forward, capable of carrying an attack in one of the most competitive leagues in the world, and Schröder seemed a good fit. But they will have to look elsewhere now. — Emily Keogh
How will she fit at Madrid?
Real Madrid failed to put pressure on Barcelona for yet another season, finishing second in the Liga F and losing 12-2 on aggregate against them in the quarterfinals of the UWCL. Despite appointing Pau Quesada as manager last summer, nothing much changed, but they do seem to be ambitious this summer and have already brought in Andreia Jacinto and Elisa Senss, while saying farewell to the last remnants of their first-ever squad, with Misa, Tere Abelleira and Rocio all leaving.
But with the departure of Weir to OL Lyonnes, the team are lacking goals. Weir has scored 10+ goals in the league in three of her four years at the club (she missed one season with ACL injury) and outscored the central striker option in two of those seasons. With Alba Redondo often switching between roles and Signe Bruun‘s unavailability due to a head injury, Madrid need options at No. 9.
Lineth Beerensteyn‘s arrival on a free transfer from Wolfsburg is a step in that direction, however the 29-year-old can be hit and miss in front of goal and wasn’t able to reach the highs of 2024-25 season.
Schröder, with her style of play and age profile, is a perfect fit for Las Blancas. She will spearhead the attack, can feed off the creative abilities of Caicedo and Keukelaar, and will share the goal scoring burden with Beerensteyn.
The weight of her “record” fee will definitely attract some unwanted pressure, but her quality should allow her to make the leap between the leagues and with some other Swedish players (Filippa Angeldahl, Hanna Bennison,Bella Andersson) at Madrid, settling in should be easy.
European residents and summer travelers alike are searching for ways to stay safe and cool as the continent swelters amid a historic heat wave, its second in just two months.
Urgent heat warnings have been issued in more than a dozen countries. The heat has disrupted rail lines in Britain, forced popular sites like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower to close early, and caused power grid failures in France, leaving more than 68,000 homes without electricity, as of Wednesday.
France recorded its hottest days ever on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the country’s weather agency, Météo-France. The agency compared the heat wave’s severity to that of August 2003, when a 16-day hot spell caused 70,000 deaths across Europe.
Residents throughout the continent are suffering in this week’s extreme heat, further exacerbated by a lack of air conditioning in some European countries. At least 40 people, many of whom were teenagers, drowned in France in the past week, leading officials to warn against swimming in unsupervised areas.
Forecasters say that temperatures across Western Europe are expected to gradually return to more seasonal levels beginning on Friday, as Eastern Europe prepares for a scorching weekend. But the peak summer travel season in Europe typically isn’t until July and August, when temperatures generally rise even higher than in June.
Tourists, accustomed to widespread air conditioning in places like the United States, Japan and the U.A.E., may be even less prepared to cope with the temperatures than locals. Here’s what to know when planning a trip.
Try to find a room with air-conditioning
Katie Wignall, a guide with Look Up London Tours, said that most hotels will provide air-conditioning. But if you’re staying in a short term rental, it’s good practice to double-check, since most homes lack cooling units.
Once you’re set with a place to stay, Ms. Wignall recommends getting around town on the Underground’s Circle, District and Elizabeth lines, or the London Overground, all of which are likely to have air-conditioning. While some buses are air-conditioned, others are “hotter than the sun,” Ms. Wignall said. She recommends sticking to the Tube.
In Rome, three-star hotels and above generally have air-conditioning, said Fabio Coppola, the owner of YellowSquare, a hostel chain in Rome, Milan, Florence and Athens. Mr. Coppola said it’s best to check with Airbnb owners, since locals often don’t use the amenity.
Stay close to parks and pools
As the day heats up, you might try going for a stroll in shaded parks or cooling off in public swimming areas.
In France, the government website for Île-de-France, the region including Paris, allows residents and visitors to search a network of climate shelters or cooling areas within a 10-minute walk. Similar information is provided by governments in Barcelona, Berlin and Vienna. Paris’s tourism office also has a list of public pools.
Sophie Gacheny, an independent tour guide based in Paris, recommends that visitors avoid the crowded public pools and the River Seine and instead take a lunch break next to the Canal Saint Martin, which was opened because of the heat wave. There, you can enjoy the cooled air wafting off the water — and even take a swim, though officials advise sticking to designated areas.
In London, families can cool off in the courtyard fountains of Somerset House or at Granary Square in Kings Cross. The shady, tree-lined streets of the Bloomsbury neighborhood are worth a detour, Ms. Wignall said. The city’s 19th century “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries are an often-overlooked free space to walk in wooded areas and see some famous names.
For shade from Rome’s blistering sun, avoid the city center and stroll through the gardens of Villa Borghese or the Giardino Degli Aranci. Or, hop on a 30-minute train and swim for free in the Mediterranean Sea at the port city of Ostia, or Santa Marinella for a “more charming and less touristy alternative,” Mr. Coppola said. If you’re visiting Milan, the Bagni Misteriosi offers a beautiful, historic public swimming pool.
Head underground
Temperatures are naturally cooler beneath the streets. In Berlin, dive back in time by touring an underground World War II bunker or escape tunnels dug in the 1960s between East and West Berlin.
In Prague, explore the city’s medieval history by touring its underground prisons, ancient cisterns and vaulted alleyways from the 13th century, which were built before flooding forced the city to be raised about 5 to 25 feet.
Near the Eiffel Tower and under Parisian ground, the Musée des Égouts de Paris, also known as Paris’s sewer museum, provides an interesting perspective on the city’s history. The Paris Catacombs are also an option, though they can get crowded.
Look for museums, churches and cathedrals
To escape the sun, tour guides recommend heading inside museums, churches and cathedrals, which tend to be cooler because of thick walls, high ceilings and, sometimes, air conditioning.
In Paris, the popular Notre-Dame Cathedral opens at 8 a.m., which Ms. Gacheny said is the best time to go. To escape the afternoon heat, focus on museums like the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, or the Musée Carnavalet, where you can hear about the history of Paris for six hours in an air-conditioned aristocratic mansion. In extreme heat, make sure to check the museums’ websites beforehand, since they sometimes close early because of high temperatures.
In London, the upper floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum are Ms. Wignall’s personal favorites. Historic churches are also a great place to cool off, she said, pointing to St. Bartholomew the Great and St. Paul’s Cathedral, both of which are generally less crowded than the British Museum or Westminster Abbey.
Start walking tours early, and bike in the afternoon
In France, with the heat soaring during the day and overnight temperatures hitting records, Ms. Gacheny said it’s generally good advice to start early.
If you want to discover Parisian neighborhoods, walk around from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Take an afternoon siesta at your accommodation, or grab a bite at hotel bars and cafes, which are the best places to find air-conditioning, Ms. Gacheny said. Then head back out around 6 p.m. for a breezy bike ride around the city.
Up in Beacon, N.Y., art handlers were arranging dozens of little embroideries under the watchful eyes of the curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi; 50 miles to the north, in Millerton, a painter named Karen Marston was painting an iceberg on the side of a barn: It was time for Upstate Art Weekend again. The five-day festival, which extends across 10 counties in the Catskills and Hudson Valley, is a chance for artists and art lovers beyond the metropolis to remind one another how large and vibrant their community really is — but it’s also the perfect excuse for city dwellers to hop on a train, or into a car, and work some fresh air and greenery into their lives.
This year’s big change, as the fair celebrates its seventh edition, is an online smart itinerary builder. Type in your preferences, from distance and direction to genre of art, and it will tell you where to go. But you can also just work the old-fashioned way, starting with a single landmark destination — like the newly renovated KinoSaito, an art center in Verplanck, or an exhibit of Richard Sandler’s street photography at the Capa Space in Yorktown Heights, or an architectural fantasia like Boscobel or the Lyndhurst Mansion — and work backward. These are some of the newer attractions that caught my eye.
The Boetti Corridor
In 1967, Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) showed a group of opaque, strangely lush objects at Galleria Christian Stein in Turin, Italy. There was a small wooden platform on the floor, lit from underneath so that its bottom edge glowed, and a collection of beige PVC pipes arranged in a formal column. This work was some of what inspired the critic Germano Celant’s term Arte Povera, which would come to evoke minimal treatments of luxurious materials and willfully absurdist takes on important questions.
For Boetti, the important questions revolved around identity, authorship and the operations of chance. “Tutto Boetti: 1966-1993” at Magazzino Italian Art, the gorgeous little temple of Arte Povera in Cold Spring, starts with a formidable selection of those early works before leaping into algorithmic drawings and the quirky, beautiful embroideries the artist had fabricated by Afghan women in Kabul and Peshawar. There’s a map of the world, an enormous pattern of black and white checks and two endlessly delightful examples of what Boetti called his “Tutto,” or “everything,” series — brightly colored depictions of miscellaneous objects that send up the rationalist urge to catalog the world even as they recall nursery school décor. In the courtyard outside the gallery, when the wind is right, you can see steam rising from the head of a bronze self-portrait with a built-in heating element.
Up the road at Dia Beacon, the museum at 3 Beekman Street, “Alighiero Boetti” opens this weekend with a wall of embroidered text art, an elaborate arrangement of postage stamps and drawings that Boetti mailed to a gallery in Tokyo in 1980 and one especially memorable map in which the fabricators, left to their own devices, colored the sea bright orange. There’s something almost too perfect about this pair of similar but different shows for an artist who changed his name to “Alighiero e Boetti,” or “Alighiero and Boetti.” What makes it even more striking is that the museums didn’t coordinate — they planned their complementary exhibitions by accident. (There is, however, a docent- and curator-led tour of both shows starting at Magazzino at noon on Saturday. R.S.V.P. essential.)
The Kingston Cluster
A surprising number of Upstate Art Weekend’s most alluring events and exhibitions are clustered in and around Kingston, a two-hour ride from Manhattan by car or Trailways bus. In a single day, in Kingston alone, you could visit the second edition of Stay Frosty Kingston, the combination “tailgate, trunk show and art fair” founded last year in a Harlem parking lot by BravinLee Programs; take in a sprawling deep-dive into the possibilities of collage at 68 Prince Street Gallery, and the equally sprawling new Upstate Photography Biennial at CPW (formerly the Center for Photgraphy at Woodstock); drop in on indoor and outdoor sculpture shows at Front Room Gallery, a large exhibition curated by the festival’s founder, Helen Toomer, at UAW HQ (“Earthen Plot”) and another little art fair in the storefronts of a semi-abandoned mall — all before cleansing your palate with some high-design Fiesta ashtrays in the original six colors (1936-38) at the new International Museum of Dinnerware Design.
But make sure you’re properly caffeinated, because there are also several unmissable shows just across the river at Bard College in Annandale. In “Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition” at Stevenson Library, the John Cage Trust uses chance procedures to put together a group of miscellaneous objects, including a box of the maestro’s own piano “preparations” and a pair of embroidered silk suspenders. (Don’t miss a live re-enactment of his “Lecture on Nothing” at 1 p.m. on Saturday.)
At the Hessel Museum of Art, alsoat Bard, exhibitions of explosively colorful paintings by Uman, a prolific artist born in Somalia, and work by the Diné mathematician and textile artist Marilou Schultz hang alongside asurvey for Betty Parsons (1900-82). Though she was best known as a gallerist who showed heavy hitters like Pollock, Rothko and Newman, Parsons was a dedicated painter herself, producing a distinctive body of abstractions in which forms like animal cells float across strangely fraught planes of unusual color.
Group Shows and Pop-Ups
What’s especially wonderful about a festival as far-flung as this one is just how many different communities it brings to light — and opens up to visitors. That’s most visible in the group shows and pop-up exhibitions.
Opening this weekend at The Campus, a former school complex in Claverack that is jointly operated by six New York galleries, is an annual large-scale summer show, this one featuring presentations of work by Tschabalala Self, Keith Haring, Pat Oleszko, Sarah Lucas and other famous names.
Glögg Glögg,a “pop-up art faire” in Woodstock, offers dozens of local artists selling affordable work, while Enlighten Peekskill, organized by Hudson Valley MOCA, showcases its formerly struggling Hudson Valley city with a mile-long path of illuminated sculpture.
“Seven Women Chase Icebergs” at the Re Institute in Millerton features climate-focused work by seven female artists who all worked together in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, including Marston and her ominous blue berg.
Just about 12 miles south, in Wassaic, the artist Danielle Klebes’s Wassaic Motorcycle and Paint Clubtransforms an actual garage into a self-conscious painted environment.
On Saturday, the Carolee Schneemann Foundation will screen several of the artist’s experimental films and videos at the Widow Jane Mine, a historic cement mine in Rosendale, where some films were set.
“Freewheeling,” a group show of “unconstrained and spontaneous work” organized by the distinctly downtown artists Adrianne Rubenstein, Annette Wehrhahn and Meg Lipke, unrolls at Lipke’s studio in Ghent, with craft beer and wood-fired pizza from Old Klaverack Brewery to sweeten the deal.
Upstate Art Weekend
The fair runs from June 25-29. For a list of the organizations across the Hudson Valley and Catskills, exhibitions, programs and cultural spaces throughout the region, see upstateartweekend.org.
Manakins can move so quickly that they often appear only as blurs of blue or red as they flit along the rainforest floors of South and Central America. The males, known for their elaborate courtship rituals, snap their wings, spin around their rivals and even do backflips to woo potential partners.
Where do they get the energy? Previous studies have shown manakins possess fast-moving muscles and hearts that can manage short bursts of intense activity. Now, genetic research suggests that these evolutionary adaptations were made possible by an important dietary change: Before they could dance, manakins had to be able to detect and digest sugary fruits.
“This is such a wonderful aspect of the study,” said Maude Baldwin, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany and an author of the study, which appeared on June 10 in Current Biology. “We were able to dig into the evolutionary history of their relationship with fruit.”
The first bird genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago, gathered from a wild species of chicken known as red junglefowl. The breakthrough gave researchers their first glimpse of avian genes and what they reveal about how birds experience the world. Notably, red junglefowl lacked a taste-receptor gene that had allowed birds earlier in evolutionary history to detect sweet flavors. (The gene is still present in mammals.)
Subsequent genetic research in other species confirmed that birds lost the taste receptor for sweetness back in the days of dinosaurs and were “ancestrally sweet-blind,” Dr. Baldwin said. But some fruit and nectar eaters found their way to sweetness anyway: They gained the ability to taste plant sugars using the receptor that mammals use for savory, umami flavors.
The new study sequenced the genomes of five manakin species, and it confirmed that manakins can taste and easily digest sugar from the fruits they eat. This adaptation gave them access to the energy they need for their spectacular shows.
“This led me to appreciate that feeding is not merely about obtaining nutrients, but may also be a driving force behind the generation of biodiversity,” said Yasuka Toda, a food scientist at Meiji University in Japan and an author of the study.
To draw this link between diet and behavior, the researchers compared the genomes of species that split off from the common ancestor of manakins at different moments in time. This enabled the scientists to reconstruct the order in which the manakin’s physiological and behavioral traits evolved.
As it turned out, even before manakins gained the ability to taste sugar using the umami receptor, they acquired a change to the gene that, in humans, helps to digest lactose. Scientists think that, in birds, this gene might help mitigate harms from natural toxins or fruit compounds that are difficult to digest. Only later did manakins gain the genes behind their energetic dance routines and colorful ornamentation — made possible, researchers believe, by the birds’ calorie-dense diet.
“We’ve been in this age of genomics for a while, but it’s still hard to get really high-quality genomic data,” said Sushma Reddy, an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the new study. “So this is a really great study, because we can actually make those connections to actual traits.”
The study’s authors hope that their interdisciplinary approach will inspire other scientists to uncover new information about manakins and other birds.
“There are so many sort of hidden surprises and hidden insights that you can get from studying the genomes of diverse organisms,” Dr. Baldwin said. “Evolution has come up with a million different ways to solve problems and different mechanisms, and we’re only aware of a small number of them.”
