Things To Do In SW Florida

If nothing else, the gray, sometimes rainy, often windy conditions on the first day of the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival sure made the blooms pop.

The 30th edition of the Walt Disney World event began Wednesday with many trademark attractions, including topiaries, flower towers, floating gardens, butterfly garden, Garden Rocks concerts and outdoor kitchens.

But there’s also newness to be found in the beds, on menus and inside the theme park’s new CommuniCore Hall.

New growth

Right away, Epcot visitors can see newly designed topiaries featuring characters great and small from “Moana,” the 2016 animated film.

You’ve got your little Heihei, a chicken character, atop Pua, the pet pig of Moana, whose figure is nearby. And then there’s megatopiary Maui (voiced in the film by Dwayne Johnson) looming. Disney tends to keep these figures proportional, Maui certainly would tower above poultry.

Maui may not be the biggest ever at the fest – let’s flash back to that big ol’ surfing Goofy of yore – but it’s a widebody with greenery girth. read more

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

Google is updating its ubiquitous search engine with the next generation of its artificial intelligence technology as part of an effort to provide instant expertise amid intensifying competition from smaller competitors.

The company announced Wednesday that it will feed its Gemini 2.0 AI model into its search engine so it can field more complex questions involving subjects such as computer coding and math.

As has been the case since last May, the AI-generated overviews will be placed above the traditional web links that have become the lifeblood of online publishers dependent on traffic referrals from Google’s dominant search engine.

Google is broadening the audience for AI overviews in the U.S. by making them available to teenage searchers without requiring them to go through a special sign-in process to see them.

The stage is also being set for what could turn out to be one of the most dramatic changes to the search engine’s interface since Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company in a Silicon Valley garage during the late 1990s. read more

MSC Cruises announced Wednesday it had named actress Drew Barrymore as the godmother for its behemoth of ship coming to Miami this spring, the MSC World America.

Barrymore has already appeared alongside actor Orlando Bloom in a commercial for the cruise line that debuted during the Super Bowl.

Famous for roles since childhood including “E.T.” and “Firestarter,” Barrymore is also known for adult roles such as
“Charlie’s Angels,” “50 First Dates” and “Never Been Kissed.” She’s now also a producer and hosts the “Drew Barrymore Show.” She will take part alongside Bloom in the ship’s naming ceremony on April 9 at the line’s new terminal in Miami.

“When MSC Cruises asked me to be the godmother of MSC World America, I immediately said yes!” Barrymore said in a press release. “I absolutely love to travel — it fuels my soul — and being part of something that helps people set off on incredible adventures is just amazing.”

The ship is the second in the line’s massive World class, coming in at more than 200,000 gross tons. That makes it the closest competition to Royal Caribbean’s Oasis and Icon class vessels, which have held the title of world’s largest cruise ship for the last two decades. read more

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By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — An insider account being billed as an “explosive dispatch” about “seven critical years” at Facebook/ Meta will be published next week.