Author: John Freddy

When Walt Disney Animation Studios opened its Vancouver production facility in 2021, the first project it took on was the series adaptation of Moana, which later became the more than $2 billion feature-film box office hit Moana 2. This development served as a “warning sign” for the California animation industry, according to a new report from the Animation Guild, BRIC Foundation and Titmouse Foundation in partnership with CVL Economics. The original Moana was largely produced at Disney’s Burbank studio, and the move up north meant that much of project’s economic impact — Moana 2 could have entailed as many as 817 jobs, $87 million in wages and $178…

The European Union fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of dollars last week. The European Commission has fined Apple €500m (£429m) and Meta €200m for breaking rules on fair competition and user choice, in the first penalties issued under one of the EU’s landmark internet laws. The fines under the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is intended to ensure fair business practices by tech companies, are likely to provide another flashpoint with Donald Trump’s administration, which has fiercely attacked Europe’s internet regulation. The Trump administration was indeed quick to rebuke the fines: a national security council spokesperson told Politico that the EU’s moves were a “novel form of…

In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure. Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on…

Johnson & Johnson has shifted its generative AI strategy away from broad experimentation across the healthcare conglomerate to a more focused approach.Chief Information Officer Jim Swanson said the move ensures that the company allocates resources only to the highest-value generative AI use cases, while it cuts projects that are redundant or simply not working, or where a technology other than GenAI works better. “That was a pivot we made after about a year of learning,” Swanson said. “Now we’ve moved from the thousand flowers to a really prioritized focus on GenAI.”The “thousand flowers” approach involved a number of use case ideas germinating from…

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official from Ann Arbor, joined the Michigan Senate race on Thursday, casting himself as a populist fighter eager to mount a muscular opposition to the Trump administration. Dr. El-Sayed, a former health director in Wayne County, Mich., who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, is the latest entrant into a Democratic primary field that is likely to be crowded and competitive. Democrats are hoping to retain the seat, now held by Senator Gary Peters, who is retiring. “We need to break the chokehold that billionaires and oligarchs like Donald Trump and Elon Musk have…

Andrea Gilbert thought she knew what would happen to her brain. The 79-year-old retired attorney, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. She hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left her writing notes to remind herself if she’d already brushed her teeth. The fate of that program is now in limbo because the Trump administration has upended the system that funds biomedical research. “It’s going to go one way or another. I’m not taking it with me,” Gilbert said from…