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The cruise industry continues to ramp up its offerings for the anticipated 21.7 million Americans expected to embark on ocean cruises in 2026. Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line have one new ship each coming online this year, plus newsworthy developments for both companies’ private resorts.

The headliners of the brand-new ships coming to Florida in 2026 are the Prima Plus-class Norwegian Luna and Royal Caribbean’s third Icon-class ship, Legend of the Seas. In destination news, Royal Beach Club Paradise Island in Nassau is now open and Norwegian Cruise Line is unveiling upgrades to its private island, Great Stirrup Cay.

These changes support a growing audience of cruisers sailing from Florida, which is home to the world’s three busiest cruise ports, in order: Port Canaveral, PortMiami and Port Everglades.

Here’s a rundown of the latest cruise news to follow in Florida and beyond in 2026.

New Florida-bound vessels

Norwegian Luna: Norwegian Cruise Line’s new 156,300-gross-ton ship builds on the success of the Prima class, bringing modern design, infinity pools, the Aqua Slidecoaster and plenty of outdoor spaces for passengers sailing from PortMiami. The vessel begins sailing weeklong Caribbean voyages from South Florida in early April. read more

The forthcoming Disney Adventure, which is Disney Cruise Line‘s newest and largest ship, appeared at Port Canaveral Thursday morning before its long journey to Asia.

The 208,000-gross-ton vessel, the first in Disney’s Global class, is bound for its year-round home in Singapore, where it will begin sailing sail three- and four-night itineraries in the South China Sea on March 10.

“The ship will continue to sail through the Panama Canal, making a stop in Los Angeles before voyaging across the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo and concluding her journey to its homeport in Singapore,” reads a Facebook post from Disney Cruise Line.

With room for more than 6,000 passengers and 2,000 crew members, the ship has seven themed areas, including the Disney Imagination Garden, Disney Discovery Reef, Toy Story Place and Marvel Landing.

This Disney Adventure started as the partially-built Global Dream, a ship originally ordered by Genting Hong Kong, a now-bankrupt Chinese holding company that owned several cruise lines. Star Cruises was the original line that planned to sail this ship until Disney Cruise Line purchased the partially-built ship in 2022. read more

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk’s Grok keeps getting into trouble, and this time, more of the world’s governments are trying to intervene.

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First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data to help predict the most plausible next word in a sentence. It’s the main product of Musk’s AI startup, xAI, which has been merged with his social media platform, X. Much like ChatGPT and Gemini, Musk’s company has also folded AI image generation capabilities into the chatbot. read more

NEW YORK (AP) — An appliance distributor is expanding a minifridge recall that now covers roughly 964,000 Frigidaire-branded products sold in the U.S., after multiple fire reports.

Following a recall of about 634,000 minifridges last year, Canada-based Curtis International recalled an additional 330,000 of another model on Thursday. According to a notice published U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the recalled fridges have electrical components that can short circuit and ignite the plastic used to make the product — risking fires and potential burns for users.

The 330,000 Frigidaire minifridges now under recall carry the model number EFMIS121 and were sold exclusively at Target. Per the Commission, six reports of fires resulting in property damage have been linked to these products to date.

The Associated Press reached out to Target and Curtis International for further comments on Thursday.

The 634,000 minifridges recalled last year had model numbers EFMIS129, EFMIS137, EFMIS149 and EFMIS175. Another 26 incidents that included the products overheating, melting or catching fire were reported at the time, as well as two related smoke inhalation injuries. read more

By KELVIN CHAN

LONDON (AP) — Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.

Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.

The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details. read more