Building new sports facilities is at the heart of a disputed plan to makeover one of Tokyo's most beloved park areas

We’re all looking for ways to make Christmas dinner easier – and if you’ve got an air fryer, festive food could be a whole lot simpler. Christmas dinner normally requires a lot of effort to pull together all the starters, turkey and side dishes, and chef Poppy O’Toole says she’ll “definitely” be using her air fryer to help everything come together. Michelin-trained O’Toole, 29, is something of an early adopter of air fryers – she first fell in love with them in 2018, and says: “I was working in kitchens at the time, and I was like, I don’t know how chefs are going to feel about this. It might fade, but I was intrigued – and it’s got bigger and bigger.” She adds: “It was so easy to get on board with because of how convenient they are. As a chef, I wasn’t at home a lot – so my partner could use it really easily without me having to be over his shoulder.” They’ve got speed and energy efficiency going for them, O’Toole suggests, and she’s even dedicated her most recent cookbook to air fryer recipes. Her air fryer will go into overdrive on Christmas day, “because I need all the space for everything”, the Worcestershire-based chef says. “I’m going to be feeding a lot of people.” “There’s not enough space to do everything, but what it’s really good at is giving you the capability to do more stuff at the same time,” she notes. “So you’re not just relying on the oven and the hob – you’ve also got this other piece of equipment, which is amazing at cooking things and it can be done quicker and more energy efficiently.” Before diving in, there are a few mistakes O’Toole warns against making with your air fryer on 25 December. “Make sure you put a timer on. I’ve done that a few times, where I’ve gone, it comes out in 20 minutes or whatever and you go, ‘yeah, I’ll come back in a few minutes, it’ll be fine’. And I’ve left it in there the whole time and it’s burned to a crisp.” The second thing to watch out for? “Don’t overcrowd,” she says. “It can be very easy to throw it all in, it’ll be fine. But it doesn’t work that way – the whole point is that the air circulation gets around everything, so it needs a gap where that can happen.” And if you’re looking to impress your guests with beautiful-looking food, O’Toole recommends keeping your air fryer clean. “This is another thing that I do very regularly, and I think a lot of people do – I don’t wash it enough, I don’t clean it enough. I end up getting these little dark bits on the rest of my food, which is fine when you’re cooking for yourself – that doesn’t matter. “But when you’re cooking for other people, if you’ve got family coming over, you want to make sure it’s the best. So make sure in between each thing you cook, you give it a little wipe down.” Interested in using your air fryer this Christmas? This is what O’Toole recommends doing… Starters “I always like little nibbly bits on Christmas,” admits O’Toole – and these can be easily whipped up in the air fryer. “It’s something a little bit different around lunchtime, because I have my Christmas dinner a bit late – I have it more as a dinner around three, so around 12 you’re getting a bit peckish. So I do some lovely little nibbles – like crispy wontons, spring rolls, samosas, that sort of thing. They’re really tasty and fill everybody up, without having to do much.” If you’re feeling industrious you can make these yourself, but they’re just as delicious from frozen – and you can save all your cooking efforts for the main meal. The main event For O’Toole, the best way to use your air fryer is for all the festive sides. “It’s really good for roasted parsnips, roasted carrots, sprouts or chestnuts,” she says. You can cook the parsnips and carrots together. “And then they can be ready and waiting for when you want them – you can get them into a tray, and once they’re cooked, you can keep them at the bottom of the oven or in a tray that you can warm back up”. And one of the most important parts of any Christmas dinner: “I’ve got to say roast potatoes are very good in there, and you don’t have to pre-boil them – so that’s given you more space on the hob.” How can you pull off perfectly crispy roasties in the air fryer? “Chop them up, get them in a bowl, add a tablespoon of water, a little bit of oil and salt – give it a mix, so we’ve got a bit of moisture on them. Then you get them into the air fryer and cook them about 160C or 170C for about 20 to 30 minutes, so they’re a little bit cooked, then you whack it up to about 200C to get the golden crispy outside.” Dessert While O’Toole doesn’t plan on making Christmas pudding in the air fryer this year, there are plenty of sweet treats you can do in there instead. Her sister will be clamouring for a pecan and pretzel blondies recipe (or you can try any variation on brownies you like – even mince pies would work), and O’Toole adds: “Custard tarts – they’re so simple and something about doing them in the oven is always terrifying to me, but being able to put them in the air fryer for literally a few minutes is perfect. “That’s definitely something I’ll be doing.” ‘Poppy Cooks: The Actually Delicious Air Fryer Cookbook’ (Bloomsbury Publishing, £20). Read More Beauty advent calendars 2021: Our guide to this year’s top treats 13 best tech gifts to spoil a gadget geek this Christmas 10 best luxury Christmas crackers for dressing up your dining table Why restaurant influencers have just ruined your dinner The Independent high street Christmas sandwich and drink taste test Seasonal affective disorder: Can you eat to improve your mood?

Jim Brown was both extraordinary and extraordinarily complicated

(Reuters) -More than 150 Starbucks stores and 3,500 workers will be on strike next week across the United States, the

The current wave of generative AI tools like ChatGPT will soon be surpassed by “interactive artificial intelligence”, according to AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman. The co-founder of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for $500 million in 2014, said the next generation of AI tools will be “a step change in the history of our species”, allowing people to not just obtain information but also order tasks and services to be carried out on their behalf. “The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data,” Mr Suleyman told MIT Technology Review. “The third wave will be the interactive phase. That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.” This will allow users to ask these AI to perform tasks for them, which they will carry out by talking with other people and interacting with other AIs. “That’s a huge shift in what technology can do. It’s a very, very profound moment in the history of technology that I think many people underestimate,” he said. “Technology today is static. It does, roughly speaking, what you tell it to do. But now technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.” When questioned about the potential risks of giving artificial intelligence autonomy, Mr Suleyman said it was important to set boundaries for the technology and make sure that it is aligned with human interests. When Mr Suleyman was still working at DeepMind, his colleagues helped develop what became known as a “big red button” that would effectively serve as an off switch for rogue AI. A research paper titled ‘Safely Interruptible Agents’ described how any misbehaving robot could be shut down or overriden by a human operator in order to avoid “irreversible consequences”. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity

'I can’t wait to stay young together and continue to grow together. I wouldn’t be where I am today without you,' Brooklyn Beckham wrote in the tribute

New Jersey has accepted a revised settlement over chemical dumping that turned a Jersey Shore community into one of America’s most notorious toxic waste cleanup sites

The new head of the World Bank said Tuesday that growing divides between rich and poor nations risked deepening poverty in the developing world, at a meeting...

The bridge connecting Crimea and Russia carries heavy significance for Moscow, both logistically and psychologically, as a key artery for military and civilian supplies and as an assertion of Kremlin control of the peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014

The Cowboys are overdue for a trip to the NFC championship game

China's highly secretive civilian spy agency has launched a public account on a major social media platform to call on "all members of society" to join its fight against espionage, offering rewards and protection for those who provide information.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy technique that is used to treat trauma-related disorders in people