Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Dana Williamson, Gov. Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, leaves the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse in Sacramento after being arrested in a federal public corruption probe involving multiple counts of bank and wire fraud on Wednesday. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Newsom's former chief of staff and two political operatives face federal corruption charges for fraud, including misusing campaign funds for luxury purchases.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Warcraft gaming universe but there's not going to be a BlizzCon gathering to celebrate it. So Blizzard is doing the next-best thing by holding a live streaming event. Blizzard announced that its special Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct stream will start at 1PM ET on Wednesday, November 13. The broadcast will run on Blizzard's official streaming channels for Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. There aren't many details available about what Warcraft fans can expect to see during the livestream except for a special concert celebrating World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary.

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world. But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical. Founded in Irvine, California, by two UCLA students named Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, the company quickly became well respected and popular thanks to a series of breakout franchises such as StarCraft and Diablo. But everything changed in 2004 with the launch of World of Warcraft (or WoW), which became an online-gaming juggernaut that made billions of dollars.

World of Warcraft (WoW) artists, designers, engineers, producers, quality assurance (QA) testers and other game developers have unionized. The staff of more than 500 workers voted to unionize the Blizzard Entertainment studio with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) creating the World of Warcraft Gamemakers Guild, according to an X post from the union's official account. The Blizzard studio is the latest major game studio to form a union during uncertain times of layoffs and studio closures across the gaming industry. Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises, formed its union with the help of CWA last weekend that includes 241 workers. "What we've accomplished at World of Warcraft is just the beginning," said Eric Lanham, a test analyst and Wow Gamemakers Guild member, in a statement released by the CWA.

Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

The time has come: our list of the 20 best games of 2023 is now live. I can't remember a year with such an embarrassment of riches to choose from, and the diversity of this list really reflects that. Most outlets – and players – appear to have divided themselves along the lines of Team Baldur's Gate, Team Zelda or Team Alan Wake 2, and any one of them would be a worthy GOTY. In the end you have to go with your heart. Have a read and see if your feelings align with ours.

This was a year of upheaval in video games. The industry has shapeshifted over the past 12 months, and it's not all due to Microsoft's lengthy acquisition of Activision, Blizzard and King. While Xbox executives were defending the legality of a $69 billion deal that would create the third-largest video game studio in the world, smaller companies were firing staff and shutting down entire teams, even amid fervent collective-bargaining efforts. It's been a wild ride. In 2023, the main factors molding the video game landscape were consolidation, layoffs and unionization, with each of these phenomena feeding into each other.

United Kingdom regulators were effectively the last hurdle stopping Microsoft from purchasing Activision Blizzard, in the biggest merger the video game industry has ever seen. That hurdle was cleared this morning as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority relented to adjusted terms. With the nearly $70 billion purchase now officially complete, Microsoft unveiled a victory blog post, complete with an extended showcase of its now-combined intellectual property with Activision, Blizzard, and King. The CMA's sticking points included Microsoft's prospective dominance in the unfolding game streaming market, and Microsoft's concessions were deep. When it initially blocked the merger early this year, regulators said that the combined publishing giant could effectively monopolize games streamed to consumers without the need for local PCs or consoles, as is already the case with Xbox Game Stream and the all-you-can-eat Game Pass subscription. Microsoft's concessions to the UK include a block on exclusivity for cloud streaming for all existing Activision games, crucially including the massive Call of Duty shooter franchise.

The UK's competition watchdog has cleared Microsoft's $69bn (£54bn) deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the maker of games including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, in a move that paves the way for both companies to complete the transaction. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) moved to block the megadeal in April, citing concerns that Microsoft – the maker of the Xbox gaming console – would dominate the nascent cloud gaming market. However, last month the watchdog said a revised deal that included selling cloud gaming rights outside Europe to Activision Blizzard's French rival Ubisoft had addressed its concerns, indicating the tie-up would be approved. Sarah Cardell, the CMA's chief executive, said on Friday that the competition regulator had ensured that Microsoft could not have a "stranglehold" over cloud gaming, which allows users to stream video games stored on remote servers on to their devices. "As cloud gaming grows, this intervention will ensure people get more competitive prices, better services and more choice," Cardell said.

A federal judge has handed Microsoft a major victory by declining to block its looming $69 billion takeover of video game company Activision Blizzard. Regulators are seeking to ax the deal because they say it will hurt competition. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said in a ruling that the "FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. Microsoft appeared to have the upper hand in a 5-day San Francisco court hearing that ended late last month. The proceeding showcased testimony by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and longtime Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who both pledged to keep Activision's blockbuster game Call of Duty available to people who play it on consoles -- particularly Sony's PlayStation -- that compete with Microsoft's Xbox. Read More: Why Microsoft's Satya Nadella Doesn't Think Now Is the Time to Stop on AI "Our merger will benefit consumers and workers.