Author: admin@primenews

Video game voice actors and motion-capture performers have called a strike over failed labor contract negotiations focused around AI-related protections for workers, bringing about another work stoppage in Hollywood. The SAG-AFTRA has called a strike of the Interactive Media Agreement that covers videogame performers, effective July 26, the union said on Thursday. The decision follows months of negotiations with major videogame companies including Activision Productions, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Take-Two Interactive, Disney Character Voices and Warner Bros Discovery’s WB Games. The Interactive Media Agreement expired in November 2022 and was being extended on a monthly basis during the talks. “Although…

An Australian field hockey player has opted to amputate part of his finger to compete at the Paris Olympics. Matt Dawson badly broke a digit on his right-hand during team training in Perth two weeks ago, and recovery from surgery to repair it would have taken months. So, the 30-year-old decided to have the finger removed from the knuckle up in order to take part in his third Games, shocking his teammates and coach. He will take to the field with the Kookaburras as they face Argentina on Saturday, just 16 days after he was injured. Dawson has told media…

Walking the endless corridors of Apple Storage in downtown Toronto, it’s not hard to see why business is booming. Behind one metal shutter, hundreds of candles are being boxed ready to be shipped around the world, behind another another an e-bike repair shop fixes transport for the city’s hundreds of delivery riders. There’s even a locker full of bitcoin ATM machines, technology banned in the UK, but legal here in Canada, which enables bitcoin owners to exchange the digital currency for cash, or vice versa. Showing me around the long, brightly lit corridors lined with rows of shuttered metal doors is…

The US economy is on the verge of an extremely rare achievement. Economic growth in the first half of the year was solid, with the economy expanding a robust 2.8% annualized rate in the second quarter, according to fresh Commerce Department figures released Thursday, which are adjusted for inflation and seasonal swings. Stocks surged in the morning after the economy’s powerful show of resilience, but later lost steam and closed the day mixed. The Dow rose 81 points, or 0.2%, after jumping more than 500 points earlier in the session. The S&P 500 fell 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.9%.…

OpenAI on Thursday announced its most direct threat yet to its stalwart Big Tech rivals: a search engine that uses artificial intelligence baked in from the beginning. The company is testing SearchGPT, which will combine its AI technology with real-time information from the web to allow people to search for information in the same way they talk to ChatGPT. While the search engine is currently in an early test for a limited number of users, OpenAI said it plans to integrate the tools into ChatGPT in the future. With the new feature, OpenAI will be directly competing with Google, which has for years dominated…

An Ohio restaurant is not responsible for a customer’s injury after a bone was found in an order of boneless wings, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday, affirming an appellate court’s earlier decision. Michael Berkheimer filed a lawsuit in 2017 after he ordered boneless wings a year earlier from Wings on Brookwood in Hamilton, Ohio, and he got a bone lodged in his throat, leading to medical issues, according to court records. In a 4-3 ruling, the state Supreme Court said Thursday that a “boneless” label on the menu “described a cooking style; it was not a guarantee.” It…

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged Hong Kong to prevent Russia from using the Asian financial hub to bypass Western sanctions during a visit to the city on Thursday. The United States and European Union have sanctioned dozens of companies in Hong Kong and mainland China for evading the extensive measures imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, including the supply of critical dual‑use goods such as semiconductors. Kuleba “called on the Hong Kong administration to take measures to prevent Russia and Russian companies from using Hong Kong to circumvent the restrictive measures imposed for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine,”…

OpenAI is working on adding new powers to its artificial intelligence (AI) bot, as it seeks to edge out Google as the go-to search engine. The company said it was trialling a search feature that incorporates real-time information into its ChatGPT product, allowing the bot to respond to user questions with up-to-date information and links. The tool is currently available to a limited number of users in the US. But it is expected to eventually be incorporated into the company’s ChatGPT bot, which launched the wave of excitement about AI when it burst on the scene in 2022. OpenAI, which is backed…

Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal painkiller for cattle that is fatal to vultures. Birds that fed on carcasses of livestock treated with the drug suffered from kidney failure…

Huge, fast-moving wildfires have destroyed up to half of the historic Canadian town of Jasper, officials say, and the blazes are still out of control as firefighters try to save as many buildings as possible. Entire streets of the main town in western Canada’s Jasper National Park have been levelled by the fire, with video showing smouldering rubble where homes once stood and the charred remains of cars. While no deaths have been reported, some 20,000 tourists and 5,000 residents have fled the mountainous area in Alberta province, which has been hugely popular with tourists for decades. During a news…