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A COURT has ruled that an Essex mental health nurse should be struck off from the profession after he slapped a patient in the face even though he denied the claim.

Staff at Danaher Animal Home have welcomed a litter of 10 puppies, after the rescue's 'heavily pregnant stray' Saskia gave birth onsite.

It connects a lovely Essex village to central London with ease

HBO 's The White Lotus delivered yet another male full-frontal nude scene on Sunday's brand new episode.

Kate, 43, will join the King and Queen, her husband Prince William , and other senior royals for the annual celebration of the global 'family of nations'.

Nominated for 10 Oscars, The Brutalist (directed and produced by Brady Corbet) has an "intriguing and controversial technical feature," according to the Baffler, that threatens to turn movie-viewing into "a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting..." In January, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth's wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy...." Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don't tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what's at issue here.... AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot...? "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet has argued. Only, they're not. Brody and Jones's performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they're no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors... AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it's steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions... Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley's politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and "users," its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It's a vote for the assholes... In short, the essays calls this "recourse to corrective AI" a "filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances." And ironically this clashes with the film's depiction of a "principled artist," according to the article. ("Some of the 'retro' digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.") The essay notes that several of 2024's other Oscar-nominated films also employed Respeecher, including Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. "What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The revelation that Mr Lowe was still hosting fundraising events alongside party treasurer Nick Candy undermines claims that he was 'out of control' and no longer a team player.

Former nurse Sarah (pictured), 51, and husband Richard Stoute, 54, won a contract to supply NHS hospitals with protective gowns and masks to frontline staff battling the pandemic.

Viewers following the news surrounding Meghan Markle's name change to 'Sussex' likely found a small scene in this week's '1923' episode particularly timely.

The US and Russia have jointly called for the United Nations Security Council to meet over the spiralling violence in Syria, after over 1,000 people were massacred this week.  

Lily James was seen leaving a dinner date with an unknown man in Paris over the weekend.

Michael Clark started teaching at Lyng Hall School in Coventry in 2009 but left his job after a pupil complained about his behaviour in 2022.

Shoppers gush over how 'light and luxurious' their hair feels after using it

The Gaite-Lyrique theatre has been overtaken by some 450 Africans who were previously sleeping rough on the streets of the capital.

A new map indicates swathes of the northeast will be covered as visibility is predicted to drop to lows of 50 metres.

A motorbike rider has died after a driver in a McLaren supercar crashed into him in an alleged hit and run. 

Red Hat product manager Pau Garcia Quiles (also long-time Slashdot reader paugq) spotted an interesting project on GitHub: Free95, a new lean, Windows-compatible operating system is available from GitHub. In its current form, it can run very basic Win32 GUI and console applications, but its developer promises to keep working on it to reach DirectX and even game compatibility. "Free95 is your friendly Windows Environment with an added trust of the open source community," according to its README file. (It's licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.) And in answer to the question "Why?" it responds "To remove Windows's bloat, and security problems. Being controlled by a large corporation is unsettling." "It's still in-development of course," the developer post recently on Reddit, "and I'll appreciate anyone who'd like to contribute." In one comment they claim Free95 is "much more lightweight, simpler and faster than ReactOS." And looking to the future, they add "I might do DirectX stuff and make some games run. Or, what about DOOM?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police were called to reports of dangerous driving and an assault on a teenage boy on Vineyard Way in Purfleet, Essex, at around 7.35pm on March 7.

Her ex is still try to recoup his reputation following his 2024 DUI arrest and tour 'disaster'.

Also, phone cleaner apps are a data-sucking scam, Singapore considering the literal rod for scammers, and more

Infosec in Brief  Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves.…