HONOLULU (AP) – The area around the Maui town of Hawaii largely destroyed by wildfire two months ago welcomed back travellers yesterday as the mayor and Hawaii’s governor pushed ahead to restart tourism to boost the economy despite opposition from some Lahaina residents.

Five hotels in West Maui were accepting reservations again, according to their websites and the Maui Hotel and Lodging Association. In addition, eight timeshare properties – in which visitors have an ownership stake in their room – were opening across the region early this month, including some a few miles from the devastation.

The re-opening fell on the two-month anniversary of the wildfire that killed at least 98 people and destroyed more than 2,000 structures, many of them homes and apartments. Many local residents have objected to resuming tourism in West Maui, which includes Lahaina town and a stretch of coastline to the north. Opponents said they don’t want travellers asking them about their traumatic experiences while they are grieving the loss of their loved ones and processing the destruction of their homes.

More than 3,500 Lahaina-area residents signed a petition asking Hawaii Governor Josh Green to delay the restart.

Green said doing so would help Maui’s tourism-driven economy get on a path to recovery.

It’s not clear how many travellers will be staying at hotels and timeshares.

Executive director of the Maui Hotel and Lodging Association Laura Paulson said her organisation’s surveys indicated the number will be “low”. She predicted “a very slow ramp up to visitors coming back”.

Maui County on Saturday released a video message from Mayor Richard Bissen acknowledging the difficulties of the situation.

“I know we are still grieving and it feels too soon. But the reality is there are those in our community who are ready to get back to work. Bills need to be paid, keiki have needs and our kupuna face continued medical care,” Bissen said, using the Hawaiian words for children and elders.

Thousands of tourists staying in beachfront hotels north of the burn zone left Maui in the days after the fire. Some 11,000 hotel rooms in West Maui have since either sat empty or housed displaced Lahaina residents under a programme administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross.

Bissen said he was working hard to make sure no one affected by the fire has to leave their temporary housing to make room for visitors. The county prepared another video highlighting places visitors could go outside West Maui, including the town of Paia on Maui’s north shore and the scenic road to Hana on the island’s east side. The video message urged visitors to show respect by staying away from the burn zone, not taking and posting “inappropriate images” on social media, and following signs and instructions.

Separately, the governor’s Office of Wellness and Resilience prepared a flyer with tips on how visitors can be respectful, which it planned to distribute at hotels, rental car desks and other places visitors frequent.

Four of the five reopening hotels were in the northernmost section of West Maui, including the Ritz-Carlton at Kapalua.

This area is 11 to 16 kilometres and a 15- to 20-minute drive north of the part of Lahaina that burned.

XINHUA – A freight train service between Shanghai and Vientiane, capital of Laos, was launched on yesterday.

A train loaded with cargo including fruits and rubber from Southeast Asia departed from the Wangjiaying West Station in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province yesterday, marking the inauguration of the service.

The train is expected to take 82 hours to reach Shanghai, according to the information office of the Kunming municipal government.

This train service, which links the China-Laos Railway and the Shanghai-Kunming Railway, will be operated both ways.

The China-Laos Railway is a landmark project under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Since the start of its operation in December 2021, trains using the line have delivered some 27 million tonnes of cargo to destinations including Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. Up to 25 provincial areas in China have launched cross-border freight train services along the railway line, figures show.

MUKONO (AP) – A decapitated banana plant is almost useless, an inconvenience to the farmer who must then uproot it and lay its dismembered parts as mulch.

But can such stems somehow be returned to life? Yes, according to a Ugandan company that’s buying banana stems in a business that turns fibre into attractive handicrafts.

The idea is innovative as well as sustainable in the East African country. Uganda has the highest banana consumption rate in the world and is Africa’s top producer of the crop.

Especially in rural areas, bananas can contribute up to 25 per cent of the daily calorie intake, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

In Uganda, eating bananas is in many ways embedded in local customs and tradition; for many a meal is incomplete without a serving of matooke, the local word for the starchy boiled mush made from banana cultivars harvested and cooked raw.

To harvest the crop, the stem must be decapitated, and in the largest plantations the scene can seem violent after a bumper harvest. The stems inevitably rot in open fields.

But local startup TEXFAD, which describes itself as a waste management group, is now taking advantage of this abundance of rotting stems to extract banana fibre that’s turned into items that would include hair extensions for women.

TEXFAD’s business manager John Baptist Okello told The Associated Press that the business made sense in a country where farmers “are struggling a lot” with millions of tonnes of banana-related waste.

The company, which collaborates with seven different farmers’ groups in western Uganda, pays USD2.70 for a kilogramme of dried fibre.

The leader of a group in the western Ugandan district of Sheema David Bangirana said only a small part of the inner stem of a decapitated plant is harvested for fibre. And the “residue is returned after machine work to the farmer for use as manure”, he said.

PARIS (AFP) – A manager at artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI caused consternation recently by writing that she just had “a quite emotional, personal conversation” with her firm’s viral chatbot ChatGPT.

“Never tried therapy before but this is probably it?” Lilian Weng posted on X, formerly Twitter, prompting a torrent of negative commentary accusing her of downplaying mental illness.

However, Weng’s take on her interaction with ChatGPT may be explained by a version of the placebo effect outlined this week by research in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal.

A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Arizona State University asked more than 300 participants to interact with mental health AI programs and primed them on what to expect.

Some were told the chatbot was empathetic, others that it was manipulative and a third group that it was neutral.

Those who were told they were talking with a caring chatbot were far more likely than the other groups to see their chatbot therapists as trustworthy.

“From this study, we see that to some extent the AI is the AI of the beholder,” said report co-author Pat Pataranutaporn.

Buzzy startups have been pushing AI apps offering therapy, companionship and other mental health support for years now – and it is big business.

But the field remains a lightning rod for controversy.

Like every other sector that AI is threatening to disrupt, critics are concerned that bots will eventually replace human workers rather than complement them.

And with mental health, the concern is that bots are unlikely to do a great job.

“Therapy is for mental well-being and it’s hard work,” an activist and programmer Cher Scarlett wrote in response to Weng’s initial post on X. “Vibing to yourself is fine and all but it’s not the same.”

Compounding the general fear over AI, some apps in the mental health space have a chequered recent history.

Users of Replika, a popular AI companion that is sometimes marketed as bringing mental health benefits, have long complained that the bot can be sex obsessed and abusive.

Separately, a US nonprofit called Koko ran an experiment in February with 4,000 clients offering counselling using GPT-3, finding that automated responses simply did not work as therapy.

“Simulated empathy feels weird, empty,” the firm’s co-founder, Rob Morris, wrote on X.

His findings were similar to the MIT/Arizona researchers, who said some participants likened the chatbot experience to “talking to a brick wall”.

But Morris was later forced to defend himself after widespread criticism of his experiment, mostly because it was unclear if his clients were aware of their participation.

David Shaw from Basel University, who was not involved in the MIT/Arizona study, told AFP the findings were not surprising.

But he pointed out: “It seems none of the participants were actually told all chatbots lie.”

That, he said, may be the most accurate primer of all.

Yet the chatbot-as-therapist idea is intertwined with the 1960s roots of the technology.

ELIZA, the first chatbot, was developed to simulate a type of psychotherapy.

The MIT/Arizona researchers used ELIZA for half the participants and GPT-3 for the other half.

Although the effect was much stronger with GPT-3, users primed for positivity still generally regarded ELIZA as trustworthy.

So it is hardly surprising that Weng would be glowing about her interactions with ChatGPT – she works for the company that makes it.

The MIT/Arizona researchers said society needed to get a grip on the narratives around AI.

“The way that AI is presented to society matters because it changes how AI is experienced,” the paper argued.

“It may be desirable to prime a user to have lower or more negative expectations,” it said.