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Tag: labor and employment

  • New York Times: Amazon plans to lay off thousands of employees | CNN Business

    New York Times: Amazon plans to lay off thousands of employees | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Amazon is planning to lay off some 10,000 employees in corporate and technology jobs, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.

    The job cuts could start as early as this week, and will likely include staff working on Amazon

    (AMZN)     devices (such as its voice-assistant Alexa), as well as people in its retail and human resources divisions, according to the report. “The total number of layoffs remains fluid,” the report stated.

    Amazon did not immediately respond to CNN Business’ request for comment Monday. CNN has not been able to independently confirm the report. The Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that Amazon is set to lay off thousands of workers, citing a person familiar with the matter.

    The news would make Amazon the latest in a spate of tech companies that have announced significant layoffs in recent weeks, amid broader economic uncertainty and a sharp slowdown in the demand many tech giants saw during the pandemic that led them to quickly add staff. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced it is laying off 11,000 employees.

    Earlier this month, Amazon said it was freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months,” citing economic uncertainty and “how many people we have hired” in recent years. Amazon rapidly grew its headcount as the pandemic shifted consumer habits and spending towards e-commerce. In its most-recent earnings report, however, Amazon forecast its revenue for the holiday quarter would be lighter than analysts had expected.

    Shares in Amazon have fallen more than 40% in 2022 so far amid a broader market decline.

    News of potential layoffs comes at a crucial time for the retail industry, ahead of the holiday shopping season. Despite recession fears and inflationary pressures, the National Retail Federation is predicting a 6% to 8% sales increase from last year during the holiday shopping months.

    Last month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted about the possibility of a looming recession, writing, “the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches.” In an interview with CNN’s Chloe Melas on Saturday, Bezos said that advice was meant for business owners and consumers alike. “Take some risk off the table,” he said. “Just a little bit of risk reduction could make the difference.”

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  • Everything you need to know about Biden’s student loan forgiveness program | CNN Politics

    Everything you need to know about Biden’s student loan forgiveness program | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s federal student loan forgiveness program, which promises to deliver up to $20,000 of debt relief for millions of borrowers, is on hold indefinitely as legal challenges work their way through the courts.

    About 26 million people had already applied by the time a federal district court judge struck down the program on November 10 – prompting the government to stop taking applications. No debt has been canceled thus far.

    The administration officially launched the application on October 17, following a brief “beta period” during which its team assessed whether tweaks were needed.

    If the courts ultimately allow the program to move forward, not every student loan borrower is eligible for the debt relief. First, only federally held student loans qualify. Private student loans are excluded.

    Second, high-income borrowers are generally excluded from receiving debt forgiveness. Individual borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and married couples or heads of households who make less than $250,000 annually will see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.

    If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness. Pell grants are awarded to millions of low-income students each year, based on factors including their family’s size and income and the cost charged by their college. These borrowers are also more likely to struggle to repay their student debt and end up in default.

    Here’s what else borrowers need to know about the new student loan forgiveness plan:

    It’s unclear when, or if, borrowers will see debt relief under Biden’s program.

    Administration officials expected to be able to grant relief before federal student loan payments are set to resume in January, when the pandemic-related pause expires. But now that timeline is in jeopardy.

    The White House has said that it has already approved 16 million applications for debt relief. The Department of Education will hold on to that information so it can quickly process those borrowers’ relief if the government prevails in court.

    If and when the program moves forward, an estimated 8 million borrowers may receive debt relief automatically because the Department of Education already has their income on file.

    If the government restarts taking applications, borrowers can apply online here: https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief/application.

    Applicants can expect to receive an email confirmation once their application is successfully submitted. Then, borrowers will be notified by their loan servicer when the debt cancellation has been applied to their account.

    Borrowers were expected to have until December 31, 2023, to submit an application.

    There are a variety of federal student loans and not all are eligible for relief. Federal Direct Loans, including subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, parent PLUS loans and graduate PLUS loans, are eligible.

    But federal student loans that are guaranteed by the government but held by private lenders are not eligible unless the borrower applied to consolidate those loans into a Direct Loan by September 29.

    The Department of Education initially said these privately held loans, many of which were made under the former Federal Family Education Loan program and Federal Perkins Loan program, would be eligible for the one-time forgiveness action – but reversed course in September when six Republican-led states sued the Biden administration, arguing that forgiving the privately held loans would financially hurt states and student loan servicers.

    Defaulted Federal Family Education Loans and defaulted Perkins Loans are still eligible for the debt relief even if they are privately held.

    If Biden’s program is allowed to move forward, eligibility is based on a borrower’s adjusted gross income for either tax year 2020 or 2021. Adjusted gross income can be lower than your total wages because it considers tax deductions and adjustments, like contributions made to a 401(k) retirement plan.

    A taxpayer’s adjusted gross income can be found on line 11 of IRS Form 1040.

    The Department of Education says it already had income information for nearly 8 million borrowers, likely because of financial aid forms or previously submitted income-driven repayment plan applications. If the program is allowed to move forward, those borrowers will automatically receive the debt relief if they meet the income requirement, unless they choose to opt out. The department has said it will email borrowers who will be considered for debt relief but don’t need to apply.

    Millions of other borrowers will need to apply for student loan forgiveness if the Department of Education doesn’t have their income information on file. When they submit the application, borrowers are required to self-attest that their income is under the eligibility threshold. They are required to certify that the information provided is accurate upon penalty of perjury.

    The Biden administration has said that applicants who are “more likely to exceed the income cutoff” will be required to submit additional information, like a tax transcript. Officials expect that just 5% of borrowers with eligible federal student loans would not qualify due to the income threshold.

    Borrowers will not have to pay federal income tax on the student loan debt forgiven, thanks to a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act that Congress passed last year.

    But it’s possible that some borrowers may have to pay state income tax on the amount of debt forgiven. There are a handful of states that may tax discharged debt if state legislative or administrative changes are not made beforehand, according to the Tax Policy Center. The tax liability could be hundreds of dollars, depending on the state.

    Yes, some current students are eligible. Eligibility for borrowers who filed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, as an independent will be based on the individual’s own household income.

    Eligibility for borrowers who are enrolled as dependent students, generally those under the age of 24, will be based on parental income for either 2020 or 2021.

    Yes, if your income meets the eligibility threshold.

    Yes, if your income meets the eligibility threshold. A parent borrower with federal Parent PLUS loans for multiple children is still only eligible for up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness.

    But a parent is only eligible for up to $20,000 in debt relief if he or she received a Pell grant for his or her own education. If only the child received a Pell grant, the parent is eligible for up to $10,000 in forgiveness.

    Most borrowers can log in to Studentaid.gov to see if they received a Pell grant while enrolled in college. Information about Pell grants received is displayed on the account dashboard and on the My Aid page. This is also where borrowers can find out how much they owe and what kind of loans they have.

    Borrowers who received a Pell grant before 1994 won’t see their Pell grant information online, but they are still eligible for the $20,000 in student loan forgiveness.

    As long as borrowers received at least one Pell grant, they are eligible.

    The Biden administration has said that eligible borrowers who have received Pell grants will automatically receive the additional debt relief.

    Yes, defaulted federal student loans are eligible for debt relief.

    For borrowers who have a remaining balance on their defaulted student loans after the cancellation is applied, there will be an opportunity to get out of default once payments resume in January 2023 as part of what the Department of Education is calling its “Fresh Start” initiative.

    The Biden administration is facing several lawsuits over the student loan forgiveness program. Many of the plaintiffs argue that the Department of Education is overstepping its authority.

    In one case, a federal judge in Texas struck down the program on November 10, declaring it illegal. The Department of Justice has appealed the ruling to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, but debt relief is on hold while that case plays out.

    Previously, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals put a temporary, administrative hold on the program on October 21, barring the administration from canceling loans covered under the policy while the court considers a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. The appeals court then granted an injunction on the program on November 14, which will remain in place until the appeals court, or the Supreme Court, issues a further order in the case.

    A lower court judge dismissed the lawsuit on October 20, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

    On the same day as the lower court dismissal, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a separate challenge to Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, declining to take up an appeal brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group.

    The Biden administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

    Lawyers for the government say that Congress gave the secretary of education “expansive authority to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies,” like the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a memo from the Department of Justice.

    Borrowers who have debt remaining after either $10,000 or $20,000 is wiped away could see their monthly payment amounts recalculated if they are enrolled in a standard repayment plan. Under a standard repayment plan, borrowers pay a fixed amount that ensures loans are paid off within 10 years.

    Borrowers who are already enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan are not likely to see their monthly payment amounts change due to the forgiveness, because their payments are based on household income and family size.

    Borrowers have not been required to make payments on their federal student loans since March 2020 because of the government’s pandemic-related pause. Biden has extended the pause through the end of this year, and payments will resume in January 2023.

    Along with Biden’s August announcement about canceling some federal student loan debt, he also said he would create a new plan that would make repayment more manageable for borrowers.

    There are currently several repayment plans available for federal student loan borrowers that lower monthly payments by capping them at a portion of their income.

    The new income-driven repayment plan that Biden is expected to propose would cap payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from 10% that is offered in most current plans, as well as reduce the amount of income that is considered discretionary. It would also forgive remaining balances after 10 years of repayment, instead of 20 years.

    Biden is also proposing that the new plan cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest. This could be very helpful for people whose monthly payments are so low that they don’t cover their monthly interest charge and end up seeing their balances explode, growing larger than what was originally borrowed.

    But we don’t know when these changes will take effect. The Department of Education has not provided any sense of timing, but has said it will propose a new rule to create the repayment plan. The department’s formal rule-making process usually includes soliciting public comments and can take months, if not more than a year.

    Yes. Borrowers have not been required to make payments on their federal student loans since March 13, 2020, because of the pandemic-related pause. But if borrowers did make payments, they are allowed to contact their loan servicer to request a refund.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook only grew bigger and more central to our lives. With lockdowns spreading, countless people began shopping, socializing and working on Facebook and other online platforms. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March 2020, usage was so high that the company was “just trying to keep the lights on.”

    Against that backdrop, Zuckerberg’s company went on a remarkable hiring spree. Facebook, which later rebranded as Meta, went from

    48,268     staffers in March 2020 to more than 87,000 as of September of this year. In other words, it hired another Facebook’s worth of staff. And it looked like the company would only keep hiring to support its ambitious plans to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse.

    On Wednesday, however, Zuckerberg reversed course and laid off more than 11,000 employees, marking the most significant cuts in the company’s history. In a memo to staff, Zuckerberg coughed up some of the hardest words in the English language. “I got this wrong,” he wrote, “and I take responsibility for that.”

    “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

    Silicon Valley operates on many myths, but one of them is the idea of the founder as a visionary who can see key trends coming years if not decades out. But Zuckerberg is one of a growing list of prominent tech leaders who are cutting costs and issuing mea culpas after failing to anticipate a whiplash in the market between 2020 and 2022.

    The tech industry, already seemingly invincible in early 2020, only grew more dominant during the pandemic while other parts of the economy were upended. Consumers shifted spending online. The Federal Reserve maintained near-zero interest rates at the time, giving tech companies easier access to capital. And private and public market valuations for tech companies only seemed to go higher.

    As the world reopened, however, many consumers have returned to their offline lives. Meanwhile, high inflation and fears of a looming recession have cut into consumer and advertiser spending, disrupting the core businesses of many of the biggest names in tech, after years of rapid growth.

    Now the industry is cutting thousands of jobs.

    Last month, home fitness company Peleton — which had been embraced by investors during the pandemic — underwent its fourth round of layoffs in 2022. Last week, payment-processing giant Stripe said it was eliminating 14% of its staff. And Twitter recently announced widespread job cuts after its new owner Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.

    While Musk was largely silent regarding the mass layoffs, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who ran the company until late 2021, said in a contrite thread that he takes responsibility for the situation. “I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” Dorsey wrote.

    Twitter headquarters is seen on Friday, October 28, 2022 the day after Elon Musk aquired Twitter for $44 billion.

    Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, one of the most valuable startups in the world, similarly told employees that leadership takes responsibility for the pandemic-era miscalculations that resulted in people losing their livelihoods.

    “For those of you leaving: we’re very sorry to be taking this step and John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it,” Collison wrote. “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.”

    Other big tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are now pausing or slowing hiring amid recession fears after a wave of expansion. Amazon, in particular, had seen breakneck growth during the pandemic, doubling its fulfillment centers in a two-year-period, only to shift earlier this year to focusing on “cost efficiencies.”

    The e-commerce giant is now freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months” and reportedly looking to cut costs in some of its unprofitable units. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said senior leadership regularly reviews investment outlook and financial performance, adding, “As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.”

    While there have been layoffs in Silicon Valley over the years, the latest wave of cost cuts appears to be hitting every corner of the industry, including the engineers and coders who were often considered untouchable. The tech bubble may not have burst, but the bubble on top of the bubble certainly has.

    Zuckerberg said Meta’s layoffs would be spread throughout the company, including impacting both its family of apps and the Reality Labs division that is tasked with helping build the metaverse. He noted that some teams — such as recruiting — will be affected more than others.

    With Musk at the helm, Twitter slashed half its staff, including on its ethical AI, marketing and communication, search and public policy teams.

    Roger Lee, a startup founder based in San Francisco, has been closely tracking layoffs in the tech industry since the onset of the pandemic via his website Layoffs.fyi. Initially, his goal was to informally keep track of staffing reductions to help look for potential candidates to recruit for his own company, a digital 401(k) provider for small businesses. Eventually, laid-off workers began submitting their own data and compiling spreadsheets for his website to attract the attention of recruiters.

    “I did not, unfortunately, anticipate the extent to which the layoffs were going to surge,” Lee told CNN Business. With nearly two months still left to go, he said the number of tech employees laid off in 2022 has already surpassed 100,000 based on his data.

    Lee said some of the biggest trends he’s been seeing recently are major job losses across recruiting, human resources, and sales teams. While “engineers are still in better shape relative to the other roles,” Lee said his data indicate even these positions have suffered cuts in recent months.

    “No one knows how long this current period is going to last,” he said.

    Already, there’s been a clear shift in the industry’s mood. Blind, a popular online forum that lets employees at major companies commune anonymously to share interview tips and brag about compensation packages, has emerged as a sobering forum where people are posting about layoffs rather then their jobs.

    Some laid-off workers are also banding together on social media and crowdsourcing spreadsheets for recruiters. These workers have created documents featuring hundreds of names and LinkedIn profiles (as well as visa statuses) of former Twitter and Meta workers.

    While some companies may be better equipped to weather the storm than others, it’s becoming apparent that no company is completely unaffected, said Nikolai Roussanov, a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

    “Tech has been clobbered so much precisely because it has been seen as very immune to fluctuations in the real economy, but in the end, nobody is immune,” Roussanov said. “And that realization, I think, is important and perhaps what contributed to these sky-high valuations coming down pretty quickly.”

    Meta’s market cap has fallen from a peak of more than $1 trillion last year to less than $300 billion. Amazon, meanwhile, has seen its market cap drop by $1 trillion from a peak last summer.

    Roussanov said current fears of a recession are not unwarranted, but in many ways, “there is a little bit of a self-fulfilling nature to this.” He added: “As these fears become more and more widespread, they slow down people’s consumption, they slow down firm investment, and that kind of snowballs on itself.”

    What’s going on in tech right now is “perhaps a taste of what’s yet to come” elsewhere, Roussanov said.

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  • Layoffs could weaken Twitter in its biggest global growth markets | CNN Business

    Layoffs could weaken Twitter in its biggest global growth markets | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN Business
     — 

    It’s less than two weeks since Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and already there are concerns that the company is choosing to ignore key risks in its biggest international growth markets.

    Twitter laid off thousands of employees across the company on Friday, including staff in India and Africa. The California-based company already had a turbulent relationship with governments in these regions, and tech experts fear that a diminished workforce will leave the platform more vulnerable than ever to misinformation and political pressure.

    Musk’s Twitter laid off nearly all the employees in its only African office just four days after it opened in the Ghanaian capital Accra, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN.

    Twitter announced that it would open its first African office in Ghana in April 2021, but its employees had been working remotely until last week. The sources told CNN that only one employee appears to have been retained in the Ghana office after the global job cuts.

    “It’s very insulting,” one former employee said on condition of anonymity. “They didn’t even have the courtesy to address me by name. The email just said ‘see attached’ and yet they used my name when they gave me an offer.”

    The company has reportedly also made sweeping reductions in India, one of its biggest markets. It laid off more than 90% of its staff in Asia’s third-largest economy over the weekend, according to a Bloomberg report this week, which cited unnamed sources. Twitter did not respond to multiple requests for comment by CNN.

    The Bloomberg report came two days after the Economic Times newspaper reported that Twitter had let go of 180 of about 230 employees in the country, citing unnamed sources.

    Free speech advocates say that slashing the workforce is bad news for both employees and users in Twitter’s international markets.

    Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at digital rights group Access Now, said that Twitter had just begun “protecting vulnerable communities” on its platform in India, and now it has sent a “clear signal” that it won’t be investing in public policy and online safety teams anymore.

    Even before the layoffs, Twitter was going through a tough time in both India and Africa.

    India’s ruling party has intensified a crackdown on social media and messaging apps since last year. American tech firms have repeatedly expressed fears that the country’s rules may erode privacy and usher in mass surveillance in the world’s fastest growing digital market. India says it is trying to maintain national security.

    As a result, Twitter had spent months locked in a high-stakes standoff with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over orders to take down content. This year, it even launched a legal challenge over orders to block content.

    Chima fears that Twitter’s depleted workforce may not have the ability to “challenge” the government and its problematic orders anymore. Musk’s other business interests — including a plan to sell Tesla vehicles in India — may further complicate the picture.

    “Musk’s simplistic understanding of free speech coupled with his desire to bring his other businesses to India and secure licensing for those,” make it hard for Twitter to push back, he explained.

    India’s tech ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

    The company also went through a challenging period in Nigeria last year.

    Last June, the Nigerian government suspended Twitter’s operations in the country, accusing the social media firm of allowing its platform to be used “for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”

    The ban was announced just two days after Twitter deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari that was widely perceived as offensive. In the tweet, Buhari threatened citizens in the southeast region following attacks on public property.

    Nigeria decided to lift the ban only in January this year.

    Tech experts now fear that the company will find it even harder to navigate new laws in emerging markets.

    “Given India’s adversarial stance against big tech, companies like Twitter have always needed an army of public policy experts in the country to deal with whatever is thrown at them,” said Nikhil Pahwa, Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama, adding that he fears Twitter will “struggle to keep pace” with policy changes in India.

    Twitter does not share user numbers, but according to India, the platform has 17.5 million users in the country. Last year, India released new technology rules, which were aimed at regulating online content and require companies to hire people who can respond swiftly to legal requests to delete posts, among other things.

    Pahwa said that while certain “statutory positions” Twitter was forced to fill in order to comply with these rules will stay, he is unsure about the fate of other departments, including public policy, business and content moderation — all of which are key to thriving in growth markets.

    Analysts are also concerned globally about the impact these layoffs will have on misinformation.

    In the United States, there are worries that the growing tumult inside Twitter could weaken its safeguards for the midterm elections.

    Yoel Roth, the company’s head of safety and integrity, said on Friday about 15% of workers in the trust and safety team were let go.

    There are similar concerns in India, where social media activity is expected to ramp up as the country prepares for major state elections in the coming months.

    Content moderation is particularly tricky in India, where over 22 languages and hundreds more dialects are spoken. Digital rights groups had been demanding an increase in investment in the activity for years.

    “Content moderation has to be specific to geography,” said Vivan Sharan, partner at Delhi-based tech policy consulting firm Koan Advisory Group.

    “Are they interested in treating all users equally?” he wondered.

    — Larry Madowo contributed to this report.

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  • Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 11,000 employees | CNN Business

    Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 11,000 employees | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday said it is laying off 11,000 employees, marking the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history.

    The job cuts come as Meta confronts a range of challenges to its core business and makes an uncertain and costly bet on pivoting to the metaverse. It also comes amid a spate of layoffs at other tech firms in recent months as the high-flying sector reacts to high inflation, rising interest rates and fears of a looming recession.

    “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post to employees. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”

    The job cuts will impact many corners of the company, but Meta’s recruiting team will be hit particularly hard as “we’re planning to hire fewer people next year,” Zuckerberg said in the post. He added that a hiring freeze would be extended until the first quarter, with few exceptions.

    In September, Meta had a headcount of more than 87,000, per a September SEC filing.

    Meta’s core ad sales business has been hit by privacy changes implemented by Apple, advertisers tightening budgets and heightened competition from newer rivals like TikTok. Meanwhile, Meta has been spending billions to build a future version of the internet, dubbed the metaverse, that likely remains years away from widespread acceptance.

    Last month, the company posted its second quarterly revenue decline and said that its profit was cut in half from the prior year. Once valued at more than $1 trillion last year, Meta’s market value has since plunged to around $250 billion.

    “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Zuckerberg wrote in his post Wednesday. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”

    Shares of Meta rose 5% in trading Wednesday following the announcement.

    Meta is not alone in feeling the pain of a market downturn. The tech sector has been facing a dizzying reality check as inflation, rising interest rates and more macroeconomic headwinds have led to a stunning shift in spending for an industry that only grew more dominant as consumers shifted more of their lives online during the pandemic.

    “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote Wednesday. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

    “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he added.

    Meta’s headcount in September was nearly twice the 48,268 staffers it had at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020.

    A handful of tech companies have announced hiring freezes or job cuts in recent months, often after having seen rapid growth during the pandemic. Last week, rideshare company Lyft said it was axing 13% of employees, and payment-processing firm Stripe said it was cutting 14% of its staff. The same day, e-commerce giant Amazon said it was implementing a pause on corporate hiring.

    Also last week, Facebook-rival Twitter announced mass layoffs impacting roles across the company as its new owner, Elon Musk, took the helm.

    In addition to the layoffs, Zuckerberg said the company expects to “roll out more cost-cutting changes” in the coming months. Meta, which like other tech giants is known for its vast, perk-filled offices, is rethinking its real estate needs, he said, and “transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office.”

    “Overall,” he said, “this will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate.”

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  • iPhone factory workers in China offered bonuses to return to work | CNN Business

    iPhone factory workers in China offered bonuses to return to work | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN Business
     — 

    One of Apple’s largest suppliers is trying to strike a delicate balance in China.

    Foxconn

    (HNHPF)     has to comply with some of the harshest Covid rules in the world while ensuring that Apple’s

    (AAPL)     shipments are not severely disrupted just before the key holiday season begins.

    The Taiwanese company, which has been racing to control a Covid outbreak at its vast campus in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, has started recruiting for the facility once again and is offering bonuses for staff who had recently left, according to a statement posted on one of the company’s WeChat accounts.

    Foxconn’s statement came just a day after Apple said it expects iPhone 14 shipments to be hit by China’s Covid curbs, which have “significantly reduced capacity” at the Zhengzhou facility, the world’s biggest iPhone factory.

    “The epidemic has disrupted our work and life, but… the company has achieved milestone results in the current epidemic prevention measures,” Foxconn said on its Zhengzhou recruitment WeChat account on Monday.

    “The production and living order of the park has been restored to normal gradually,” the statement added.

    Anxious workers had reportedly fled the locked-down facility. Videos of many people leaving Zhengzhou on foot have gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. Foxconn is now stepping up measures to get its staff back.

    If they return, staff who left between October 10 and November 5 will receive a one-off bonus of 500 yuan ($69), according to the company. New workers will be offered a salary of 30 yuan ($4) per hour, according to the post.

    Last Wednesday, Chinese authorities imposed a seven-day lockdown on the manufacturing zone that houses the Foxconn plant.

    Workers will be able to start their work as soon as the “district-level lockdown is lifted,” Foxconn said in the WeChat post, at which point employees will be collected and driven to the factory for a closed-loop system — where staff will work and live on site.

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  • Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN

    Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    CNN Opinion contributors share their thoughts on the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a clear message to every Republican voter Tuesday night: My way is the path to a national majority, and former President Donald Trump’s way is the path to future disappointments and continued suffering.

    Four years ago, DeSantis won his first gubernatorial race by less than a percentage point. His nearly 20-point win against Democratic candidate Charlie Crist on Tuesday sent the message that DeSantis, not Trump, can win over the independent voters who decide elections.

    DeSantis’ decisive victory offers a future where the Republican Party might actually win the popular vote in a presidential contest – something that hasn’t been done since George W. Bush in 2004.

    Meanwhile, many of the candidates Trump endorsed in 2022 struggled, and it was clear from CNN exit polls that the former President – with his 37% favorability rating – would be a serious underdog in the 2024 general election should he win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time.

    My friend Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights tweeted a key observation: DeSantis commanded huge support among Latinos in 2022 compared to Trump in 2020.

    In 2020, Biden won the heavily Latino Miami-Dade County by seven points. DeSantis flipped the county on Tuesday and ran away with an 11-point win.

    In 2020, Biden won Osceola County by nearly 14 points. This time, DeSantis secured the county by nearly seven points, marking a whopping 21-point swing.

    DeSantis combined his strength among Latinos with his support among working class Whites, suburban white-collar voters and rural Floridians. That’s a coalition that could win nationally, unlike Trump’s limited appeal among several traditional Republican voting segments.

    Last year, it was Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of Virginia who scored an earthquake in a Biden state by keeping Trump at arm’s length and focusing on the issues. Tonight, it was DeSantis who ran as his own man (Trump rallied for Marco Rubio but not DeSantis at the end of the campaign) and showed what you can do when you combine the political instincts required to be a successful Republican these days with actual governing competence.

    DeSantis made a convincing case that he, rather than Trump, gives Republicans the best chance to defeat Biden (or some other Democrat) in 2024. With Trump plotting a reelection campaign announcement soon, DeSantis has a lot to think about and a solid springboard from which to launch a challenge to the former President.

    Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign adviser, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

    Roxanne Jones

    Let it go. If election night confirmed anything for me it is this: We can all – voters, doomscrollers, pundits and election deniers included – stop believing every election revolves around former President Donald Trump. Instead, when asked in exit polls across the country, younger people, women and other voters in key demographics said their top concerns were inflation, abortion rights, crime and other quality of life issues.

    What a relief. It finally feels like a majority of voters want to re-center American politics away from the toxic, conspiracy theory-driven rhetoric we’ve experienced over the past several years.

    Yes, Republicans are still projected to take control of the House of Representatives, with a narrow (and narrowing) majority – but will that make much difference? Despite the advantage Democrats had in the chamber the past two years, President Joe Biden has still had to battle and compromise to get parts of his agenda passed. How the balance of power will settle in the Senate is unclear, with a few races in key states still undecided as of this afternoon. It will likely hinge, again, on Georgia, and a forthcoming runoff election between the incumbent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, and his GOP challenger, former football star Herschel Walker.

    No matter what party you claim, there were positive signs coming out of the midterms. My hometown, Philadelphia, and its surrounding suburbs, came up big in another election – rejecting the Trump-backed New Jersey transplant, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and helping to send Democratic candidate John Fetterman to the US Senate. Pennsylvania voters also rejected an election denier, Doug Mastriano, in the race for state governor, and made history by electing Democrat Summer Lee as the state’s first Black woman to serve in Congress.

    Maryland voters, meanwhile, elected Democrat Wes Moore as their state’s first Black governor. And in New England, Maura Healey became Massachusetts’ first female governor. She’s also the first out lesbian to win a state governorship anywhere in the US.

    Democracy, freedom and equality also won out on ballot issues.

    In unfinished business, voters tackled slavery, permanently abolishing “involuntary servitude” in four states – Vermont, Oregon, Alabama and Tennessee. (Louisiana held on to the slavery clause under its constitution, however.)

    Despite efforts to limit voting rights across the nation, voters in Alabama approved a measure requiring that any change to state election law goes into effect at least six months before a general election. And, in Kentucky, voters narrowly beat back an amendment that would have removed constitutional protections for abortion rights – one of several instances in which voters refused to accept restrictive reproductive rights measures.

    Still, the highlight of my midterms night was watching 25-year-old Maxwell Frost win a US congressional race in Florida – holding a Democratic seat in a state whose 2022 results skewed red, no less. More and more, we are seeing young people energized, voting and stepping up with fresh ideas to lead this democracy. I’m here for it.

    Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD.

    Michael D'Antonio

    Voters made Tuesday a bad night for former President Donald Trump. Despite his efforts, many of his favorites not only lost but denied the GOP the usual out-party wave of wins that come in midterm elections. This leaves a diminished Trump with the challenge of deciding what to do next.

    In the short term, the man who so often returns to his well-worn playbook resumed his years-long effort to ruin Americans’ confidence in any election his team loses. “Protest, protest, protest,” he told his followers, even before all the polls closed. In a sign of his declining power, no mass protests ensued.

    Nevertheless, false claims of election fraud will likely be a major theme if he follows through on his loudly voiced hints that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024.

    To run or not to run is now the main question. It’s not an easy choice. Trump could end up like other one-term presidents he has mocked, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who retreated from politics and devoted themselves to new interests. However, he has other options. He could revive his television career – Fox News? – or return to his businesses. Or, he could develop a new role as leader of an organization that can exploit his prodigious fundraising ability, and give him a platform for grabbing attention, while leaving him plenty of time for golf.

    Running could forestall the various legal problems he faces, but he has lawyers who might accomplish the same goal. Fox News is unlikely to pay enough, and his businesses are now being watched by a court-appointed overseer. This leaves him with a combination of easy work – fundraising and pontificating – combined with his favorite pastimes: fame, money and fun. What’s not to like?

    Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book “High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.”

    Jill Filipovic

    Democrat Kathy Hochul won the New York State gubernatorial race, and thank goodness. Her opponent, Lee Zeldin, is not your typical moderate Republican who usually stands a chance in a blue state. Instead, he’s an abortion opponent who wanted voters to simply trust he wouldn’t mess with New York’s abortion laws.

    Zeldin was endorsed by the National Rifle Association when he was in Congress. He is a Trump acolyte who voted against certifying the 2020 election in Congress, after texting with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and reportedly planning to contest the outcome of the 2020 election before the results were even in.

    New Yorkers sent a definitive message: Our values matter, even in moments of profound uncertainty.

    Plus, Hochul made history as the first woman elected to the governor’s office in New York.

    This race was, in its final days, predicted to be closer than it actually was. Part of that was simply the usual electoral math: The minority party typically has an advantage in the midterms, and Republicans are a minority in Washington, DC, with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress. And polling in New York state didn’t look as good for Hochul as it should have in a solidly blue state: Voters who talked to pollsters emphasized crime fears and the economy; abortion rights were galvanizing, but didn’t seem as definitive in an election for a governor vastly unlikely to have an abortion criminalization bill delivered to her desk.

    The polls were imperfect. It turns out that New Yorkers are, in fact, New Yorkers: Not cowed by overblown claims of crime (while I think crime is indeed a problem Democrats should address, New York City remains one of the safest places in the country); determined to defend the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity that makes our state great; and committed to standing up against the tyranny of an anti-democratic party that would force women into pregnancy and childbirth.

    However, Democrats shouldn’t take this win for granted. The issues voters raised – inflation, crime – are real concerns. And the reasons many voters turned out – abortion rights, democratic norms – remain under threat.

    Hochul’s job now is to address voter concerns, while standing up for New York values: Openness, decency, freedom for all. Because that’s what New Yorkers did today: The majority of us didn’t cast our ballots from a place of fear and reaction, but from the last dregs of hope and optimism. We voted for what we want. And we now want our governor to deliver.

    Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter.

    Douglas Heye

    North Carolina’s Senate race received less attention than contests in some other states – possibly a result of the campaign having lesser-known candidates than states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

    In the waning weeks of the race, multiple polls had the candidates – Democratic former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley and Republican US House Rep. Ted Budd – separated by a percentage point or less.

    Perhaps more than in any other Senate campaign, the issue of crime loomed large in North Carolina, with Budd claiming in his speeches that it had become much more dangerous to walk the streets in the state. That talking point, along with his focus on inflation, appeared to help propel him to victory in Tuesday’s vote.

    Beasley, by contrast, focused much of her attention on abortion, making it a central plank of her campaign that she would stand up not just for women’s reproductive rights, but workplace protections and equal pay.

    The two candidates were vying for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr. Despite being seen as a red state – albeit that is less solidly Republican than neighboring southern states – North Carolina has elected Democrats as five of the last six governors and two of the last six senators.

    Former President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 but lost it in 2012 by one of the closest margins in the nation. And while Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020, he never received 50% of the vote.

    Douglas Heye is the ex-deputy chief of staff to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a GOP strategist and a CNN political commentator. Follow him on Twitter @dougheye.

    Sophia A. Nelson

    Many of us suspected that Democratic Florida Congresswoman and former House impeachment manager Val Demings would have an uphill battle unseating incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio, and weren’t entirely surprised when she lost the race. With 98% of the vote counted, Rubio won easily, garnering 57.8% of the vote to Demings’ 41.1%.

    As it turns out, Tuesday was a tough night all around for Black women running statewide. Beyond Demings’ loss, Judge Cheri Beasley narrowly lost her Senate bid in North Carolina.

    And in the big heartbreak of the night, Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor’s race to Gov. Brian Kemp – a repeat of her defeat to him four years ago, when the two tangled for what at the time was an open seat.

    Abrams shook up the 2018 race by expanding the electoral map, enlisting more women and people of color who turned out in record numbers – but she fell short of punching her ticket to Georgia’s governor’s mansion. And on Tuesday she lost to Kemp by a much wider margin than in 2018.

    Had Abrams succeeded, she would have been the first Black woman to become the governor of a US state. After her second straight electoral loss, America is still waiting for that breakthrough.

    Meanwhile, an ever bigger winner of the night was Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, who handily defeated Democrat Charlie Crist.

    DeSantis’ big night solidifies what some feel is a compelling claim to front-runner status for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, on what turned out to be a strong election night for Republicans in the state.

    It’s hard for a Democrat to win statewide in the deep South. And as Demings, Beasley and Abrams have shown, it’s particularly tough for a Black woman to win statewide in the region: In fact, it’s never been done.

    All three women were well-qualified and well-funded stars in their party. But, when we look at the final vote tallies, it tells a familiar story. Take Demings, for example, a former law enforcement officer – she was Orlando’s police chief – and yet, she did not get the big law enforcement endorsements. Rubio did, although he never wore the blue.

    That was a big red flag for me, and it showed how much gender and race still play in the minds of male voters and power brokers of my generation and older. For Black women, a double burden of both race and gender at play. It is the nagging story of our lives.

    As for Abrams, I think Kemp was helped by backing away from Trump and modulating his campaign message to appeal to suburban women and independents.

    Abrams, meanwhile, just didn’t have the same support and enthusiasm this time around for her candidacy. And that is unfortunate, but for her to lose by such a big margin says much more.

    At the end of the day however, these three women have nothing to regret. They ran great campaigns, and they created great future platforms for themselves. And they each put one more crack in the glass ceiling facing candidates for the US Senate and governors’ mansions.

    Sophia A. Nelson is a journalist and author of the new book “Be the One You Need: 21 Life Lessons I Learned Taking Care of Everyone but Me.”

    David Thornburgh

    Reflections on the morning after Election Day can be a little fuzzy: Chalk it up to a late night, incomplete data and a still-forming narrative. Still, as a longtime Pennsylvania election-watcher, I see three clear takeaways:

    1) Pennsylvanians don’t take to extreme anti-establishment candidates. The GOP candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, broke the mold of just about any statewide candidate in the last few decades.

    The state that delivered wins to center-right and center-left candidates like my father Gov, Dick Thornburgh, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov, Tom Ridge gave establishment Democrat Josh Shapiro a wipeout double-digit victory.

    2) “You’re not from here and I am” and “Stick it to the man” proved to be sufficiently powerful messages for alt-Democrat John Fetterman to win his Senate race, albeit by a much smaller margin.

    Amplified by more than $300 million in campaign spending (making PA’s the most expensive Senate race in the country), those two simple themes spoke to the quirky, stubborn authenticity that is a longstanding strand of Pennsylvania’s political DNA.

    3) In the home of Independence Hall, independent voters made a significant difference. Pretty much every poll since the beginning of both marquee races showed the two party candidates with locked in lopsided mirror-image margins among members of their own party.

    Over 90% of Democrats said they’d vote for Shapiro or Fetterman and close to 90% of Republicans said the same of Mastriano or Oz. The 20 to 30% of PA voters who consider themselves independent voters may have been more decisive than most tea-leaves readers gave them credit for.

    Most polls showed Shapiro and Fetterman with whopping leads among independent voters. They may not have been the same independent voters: Shapiro’s indy supporters could be former GOP voters disaffected by Trump, and Fetterman’s indy squad could be young voters mobilized by the abortion rights issue (about half of young voters are independents nationally).

    The growing significance of this independent vote in close elections may increase pressure on both parties to repeal closed primaries so that indy voters can vote in those elections. Both parties will want to have more time and opportunity to court them in the future.

    With Florida ripening to a deeper and deeper Red, Pennsylvania may loom larger and larger as the most contested, consequential swing state in the country: well-worth watching as we move inexorably to 2024.

    David Thornburgh is a longtime Pennsylvania civic leader. The former CEO of the Committee of Seventy, he now chairs the group’s Ballot PA initiative to repeal closed primaries. He is the second son of former GOP Governor and US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

    Isabelle Schindler

    The line of students registering to vote on Election Day stretched across the University of Michigan campus, with students waiting for over four hours. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. For many young people, especially young women, there was one motivating issue that drove their participation: abortion rights.

    One of the most important and contentious issues on the ballot in Michigan was Proposal 3 (commonly known as Prop 3), which codifies the right to abortion and other reproductive freedoms, such as birth control, into the Michigan state constitution. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many Michiganders have feared the return of a 1931 law that bans abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and contains felony criminal penalties for abortion providers.

    Though the courts have prevented that old law from taking effect, voters were eager to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution, and overwhelmingly voted in favor of Prop 3 with over 55% of voters approving the proposal. This is a major feat given the coordinated campaign against the proposal. Both pro-life groups and the Catholic Church strongly opposed it, and many ads claimed it was “too confusing and too extreme.”

    The issue of abortion was a major focal point of the gubernatorial campaign between Gov, Gretchen Whitmer and her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon. Pro-Whitmer groups consistently highlighted Dixon’s support of a near-total abortion ban and her past comments that having a rapist’s baby could help a victim heal. Whitmer’s resounding win in the purple state of Michigan is certainly due, in part, to backlash against Dixon’s extreme positions on the issue.

    After the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, so many young voters felt helpless and despondent about the future of abortion rights. However, instead of throwing in the towel, Michigan voters showed up and displayed their support for Whitmer and Prop 3, showing that Michiganders support bodily autonomy and the right to choose.

    Isabelle Schindler is a senior at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. She is a field director for College Democrats on her campus and has worked as a UMICH Votes Fellow to promote voting.

    Paul Sracic

    From the beginning, the US Senate race in Ohio wasn’t expected to be close. In the end, it wasn’t – with author and political newcomer J.D. Vance defeating Rep. Tim Ryan by over six percentage points.

    Republicans also swept every statewide office in Ohio, including the elections for justices on the Ohio Supreme Court who, for the first time, had their political party listed next to their names on the ballot. This will give the Republicans a dependable majority on state’s highest court, which is significant since there is an ongoing unresolved legal battle over the drawing of state and federal legislative districts.

    It is now safe to say that Ohio, for so long the quintessential swing state, is a Republican state. What happened is simple to explain: White, working-class voters have become a solid part of the Republican coalition in the Buckeye State. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump convinced these voters that the Democratic Party had abandoned them to progressive and internationalist interests with values they did not share. This shift was symbolized by the movement of voters in the former manufacturing hub of Northeast Ohio, once the most Democratic part of the state, to the GOP.

    The question going into 2022 was whether the Republicans could keep these voters if Trump was not on the ballot. The Democrats recruited Rep. Tim Ryan to run for the Senate because he was from Northeast Ohio, having grown up just north of Youngstown. They hoped that he could win those working-class voters back, and Ryan designed his campaign around working-class economic interests, distancing himself from Washington, DC, Democrats and even opposing President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Once the votes were counted, however, Ryan performed only slightly better than Biden had in Northeast Ohio. In fact, he even lost Trumbull County, the place where he grew up and whose voters he represented in Washington for two decades.

    Ohio Democrats will face another test in two years, when the Democratic Senate seat held by Sherrod Brown will be on the ballot. Brown won in 2018, but given last night’s result, the Republicans will have no problem recruiting a quality candidate to run for a seat that, right now, at least leans Republican.

    Paul Sracic is a professor of politics and international relations at Youngstown State University and the coauthor of “Ohio Politics and Government” (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @pasracic.

    Joyce M. Davis

    Pennsylvanians clearly rejected the worst of right-wing extremism on Nov. 8, sending a strong message to former President Donald Trump that his endorsement doesn’t guarantee victory in the Keystone State.

    Trump proved to be a two-time loser in the commonwealth this election cycle, despite stirring up his base with screaming rallies for Republican candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano and Rep. Scott Perry.

    And a lot of people are breathing a long, hard sign of relief.

    Mastriano, who CNN projects will lose the race for the state’s governor to Democrat Josh Shapiro, scared many Pennsylvanians with his brash, take-no-prisoners Trump swagger. He inflamed racial tensions, embraced Christian nationalism, and once said women who violated his proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder. On top of all that, he’s an unapologetic election denier.

    Dr. Oz, meanwhile, couldn’t shake his carpetbagger baggage, and Oprah’s rejection – on November 4, she endorsed his rival and now-victorious candidate in the Senate race, John Fetterman – seems to have carried more weight than Trump’s rallies, at least in the feedback I’ve received from readers and community members.

    All of this should compel some serious soul-searching among Republican leadership in Pennsylvania. What could have they been thinking to place all their marbles on someone so outside of the mainstream as Mastriano? Did they think Pennsylvanians wouldn’t check Oz’s address? Will they rethink their hardline stance on abortion?

    In a widely-watched House race, Harrisburg City Councilwoman Shamaine Daniels made a valiant Democratic effort to unseat GOP Rep. Scott Perry, after the party’s preferred candidate pulled out of the race. But her lack of name recognition and inexperience on the state or national stage impacted her ability to establish a base of her own. So the five-term incumbent, who played a role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, will return to Washington – though perhaps with a clipped wing.

    Many Pennsylvanians may be staunch conservatives, but we proved we’re not extremists – and we won’t embrace Trump or his candidates if they threaten the very foundations of democracy.

    Joyce M. Davis is outreach and opinion editor for PennLive and The Patriot-News. She is a veteran journalist and author who has lived and worked around the globe, including for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder Newspapers in Washington, DC, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.

    Edward Lindsey

    In the last two years, President Joe Biden, Sen. Jon Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock, all Democrats, won in the Peach State. There has been a raging debate in Georgia political circles since then as to whether these races signal a long-term left turn toward the Democratic Party, caused by shifting demographics, or whether they were merely a negative reaction to former President Donald Trump. Tuesday’s results point strongly to the latter.

    Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who had rebuffed Trump’s demand to overturn the 2020 presidential result, cruised to a convincing reelection on Tuesday with a pro-growth message by defeating the Democrats’ rising star Stacey Abrams by some 300,000 votes. His coattails also propelled other Republican state candidates to victory – including the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who had also defied the former President – and helped to keep the Georgia General Assembly firmly in GOP hands.

    However, before sliding Georgia from a purple political state back into the solid red state column, we still have one more contest to look forward to: a runoff for the US Senate, echoing what happened in Georgia’s last set of Senate races.

    Georgia requires candidates to win over 50% of the vote and the presence of a Libertarian on the ticket has thrown the heated race between Warnock, the incumbent senator and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgia football great Herschel Walker into an overtime runoff campaign to be decided on December 6.

    Both Walker and Warnock survived November 8 to fight another day despite different strong headwinds facing each of them. For Warnock, it has been Biden’s low favorability rating – hovering around 40% nationwide, and only 38% in Georgia, according to Marist. For Walker, it has been the steady drumbeat of personal allegations rolled out over the past few months, some admitted to and others staunchly denied.

    Warnock has faced his challenge by emphasizing his willingness to work across the aisle on some issues and occasionally disagreeing with the President on others. Walker, who is backed by Trump, has pulled from the deep well of admiration many Georgians feel for the former college football star.

    Both of these strategies were strong enough to get them into a runoff, but which strategy will work in that arena? The answer could be crucial to determining which party controls the US Senate, depending on the result of other races that have yet to be called. Stay tuned while Georgians enjoy having the two candidates for Thanksgiving dinner and into the holiday season.

    Edward Lindsey is a former Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives and its majority whip. He is a lawyer in Atlanta focusing on public policy and political law.

    Brianna N. Mack

    In his bid to win a seat in the US Senate, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan tried to appeal to working class voters who felt abandoned by establishment Democrats. Those blue collar voters – many of them formerly members of his party – overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

    Unfortunately for Ryan, his strategy failed. He lost to J.D. Vance by a decisive margin, according to election projections.

    It was, perhaps, a predictable ending for a candidate who threw away the traditional approach of rallying your base and instead courted the almost non-existent, moderate Trump voter. And it’s a shame. Had Ryan won, Ohio would have had two Democratic senators. The last time that happened was almost 30 years ago, when Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn represented our state.

    But in wooing Republicans and right-leaning moderates, Ryan abandoned many of Ohio’s left-leaning Democrats who brought him to the dance.

    That approach was perhaps most evident in his ads. In a campaign spot in which he is shown tossing a football at various computer screens showing messages he disapproves of, he hurls the ball at one emblazoned with the words “Defund the Police” and dismisses what he disdainfully calls “the culture wars.”

    Another ad showed Ryan, gun in hand, hitting his mark at target practice, as the words “Not too bad for a Democrat” appear on the screen. To imply you’re pro-gun rights when majority of Americans support gun control legislation – and when your party explicitly embraces a pro-gun control stance is bewildering. Ryan’s ads on the economy began to parrot the anti-China rhetoric taken up by Republicans. And when President Joe Biden announced his student debt plan in an effort to invigorate the Democratic bringing economic relief to millions of millennial voters, Ryan opposed the move.

    As a Black woman living in a metropolitan area, I would have liked to see him reach out to communities of color, perhaps by making an appearance with African American members of Ohio’s congressional delegation Rep. Joyce Beatty or Rep. Shontel Brown. But I would have settled for one ad addressing the economic or social concerns of people who don’t live in the Rust Belt.

    Ryan might have won if he’d gotten the kind of robust backing from his own party that Vance got from his – and if he’d courted his Democratic base.

    Brianna N. Mack is an assistant professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University whose coursework is centered on American political behavior. Her research interests are the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. She tweets at @Mack_Musings.

    James Wigderson

    Wisconsin remains as split as ever with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers surviving a challenge from businessman Tim Michels and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson barely holding off a challenge from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

    In late February, Johnson, who Democrats hoped might be a beatable incumbent, was viewed favorably by only 33% of Wisconsin’s voters, according to the Marquette University Law School poll. He was viewed unfavorably by 45% of the electorate with 21% saying they didn’t know what to think of him or hadn’t heard enough about him. He finished the election cycle still seen unfavorably by 46% with 43% of the voters holding a favorable view of him.

    However, Democrats decided to run possibly the worst candidate if they wanted to win against Johnson. At one point in August, the relatively unknown Barnes actually led Johnson by 7%. But familiarity with Barnes didn’t help him. Crime was the third most concerning issue for Wisconsin voters this election cycle, according to the Marquette University Law School poll, and Johnson’s campaign successfully attacked Barnes for statements in support of decreasing or redirecting police funding and for reducing the prison population. In the end, Johnson came out victorious.

    So, with Republicans winning in the Senate, what saved Evers in the gubernatorial race? Perhaps it was women voters.

    The overturning of Roe v. Wade meant Wisconsin’s abortion ban from 1849 went back into effect. Michels supported the no-exceptions law but then flip-flopped and said he could support exceptions for rape and incest. Johnson, for his part, successfully deflected the issue by saying he wanted Wisconsin’s abortion law to go to referendum.

    Another issue that may have soured women voters on Michels was the allegation of a culture of sexual harassment within his company. Evers’ campaign unsurprisingly jumped at the opportunity to argue that “the culture comes from the top.” (In response to the allegations against his company, Michel said: “These unproven allegations do not reflect the training and culture at Michels Corporation. Harassment in the workplace should not be condoned, nor tolerated, nor was it under Michels Corporation leadership.”) Michels’ divisive primary fight against former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch also didn’t help his appeal to women voters, especially in Kleefisch’s home county of Waukesha, formerly a key to a Republican victory in Wisconsin.

    If Republicans are going to win in 2024, they need to figure out how to attract the support of suburban women.

    James Wigderson is the former editor of RightWisconsin.com, a conservative-leaning news website, and the author of a twice-weekly newsletter, “Life, Under Construction.”

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  • This oil refiner is cutting 1,100 jobs — and giving billions of dollars to its shareholders | CNN Business

    This oil refiner is cutting 1,100 jobs — and giving billions of dollars to its shareholders | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Phillips 66 is cutting at least 1,100 jobs by the end of this year as the refining giant seeks to slash costs and steer a larger chunk of its soaring profits to shareholders.

    At its investor day meeting in New York Wednesday, Phillips 66 detailed plans to slim down in a bid to save about $1 billion in annual costs.

    In a presentation to shareholders, the refiner projected a workforce of under 12,900 people by the end of this year, down from 14,000 last year and 14,300 in 2020.

    Phillips 66 spokesperson Bernardo Fallas said the smaller workforce was driven by a combination of attrition and eliminated positions.

    Most of the job cuts have already taken place and were communicated to employees in late October, the spokesperson said, adding that recent attrition levels significantly lowered the number of employees impacted.

    The layoffs come despite the fact that Phillips 66, one of the nation’s largest refiners, has raked in $9.1 billion in profit so far this year, up from just $44 million a year ago. The company’s share price has soared 45% so far this year, easily outperforming the 20% decline for the broader S&P 500.

    “Phillips 66 is undergoing a company-wide effort to optimize its cost structure and reimagine its operating model to enable sustainable savings,” the spokesperson said.

    Houston-based Phillips 66 said the cost-cutting moves, along with other steps, will give the company more financial firepower to boost stock buybacks and dividends.

    Phillips 66 said it plans to return an additional $10 billion to $12 billion to shareholders between mid-2022 and the end of 2024.

    “We are announcing a number of priorities designed to reward shareholders,” Phillips 66 CEO Mark Lashier said in a statement.

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  • Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg tells employees layoffs coming Wednesday | CNN Business

    Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg tells employees layoffs coming Wednesday | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told company executives that major layoffs at the tech giant will begin on Wednesday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday afternoon.

    Meta declined to comment to CNN on the report, which said Zuckerberg told the executives at Facebook

    (FB)    ’s parent company that he is accountable for the job cuts, after his over-optimism about growth had led to excessive hiring.

    Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Journal reported that the upcoming job cuts will likely impact many thousands of employees and mark the first broad headcount reductions in the company’s history.

    Meta had more than 87,000 employees as of September, per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, representing a year-over-year increase of 28%, as it staffed-up during the pandemic while business boomed.

    More recently the company’s core business has been hit hard by fast-growing competition from rivals such as TikTok, as well as recent changes from Apple

    (AAPL)     related to ad-targeting. Fears of a looming recession have also led to advertisers tightening their belts. Once boasting a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion last year, Meta is now valued at about $250 billion.

    Meanwhile, the company has also been spending billions on a future version of the internet dubbed the metaverse, which likely remains years away. Late last month, Meta posted its second quarterly revenue decline since going public and reported that its profit was less than half the amount it made during the same period in the prior year.

    Amid a broader market downturn that has particularly pummeled the tech sector, shares for Meta have fallen more than 70% in 2022 alone.

    The reports of significant layoffs at Meta come as other tech companies have announced major job cuts. Last week, rideshare company Lyft said it was axing 13% of employees, and payment-processing firm Stripe said it was cutting 14% of its staff. The same day, e-commerce giant Amazon

    (AMZN)     said it was implementing a pause on corporate hiring.

    Also last week, Twitter announced sweeping job cuts across the company after Elon Musk took the helm following his acquisition of the company for $44 billion, which required taking on significant debt.

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  • Amazon will pause corporate hiring for months | CNN Business

    Amazon will pause corporate hiring for months | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Amazon is pressing pause on corporate hiring and expects to keep the policy in place for months, in the latest sign that even the biggest tech companies are rethinking staffing in an uncertain economic climate.

    The e-commerce giant has decided to implement a “pause on new incremental hires in our corporate workforce,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon

    (AMZN)    , said in a memo to employees this week. The letter was shared on Amazon

    (AMZN)    ’s website on Thursday.

    “We had already done so in a few of our businesses in recent weeks and have added our other businesses to this approach,” Galetti wrote. “We anticipate keeping this pause in place for the next few months, and will continue to monitor what we’re seeing in the economy and the business to adjust as we think makes sense.”

    Amazon will continue to hire backfills for some employees who leave for new opportunities, she said, “and there are some targeted places where we will continue to hire people incrementally.”

    Amazon saw its business boom during the pandemic, as more customers turned to online shopping. But as pandemic restrictions eased, however, Amazon has had to confront the dual challenges of more people returning to in-person shopping and a souring economic outlook weighing on consumers’ demand.

    Late last week, Amazon forecast its revenue for the holiday quarter would be lighter than analysts had expected, causing its stock to fall sharply. Shares of Amazon are down more than 45% this year.

    In recent months, tech companies including Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook-parent Meta, Twitter and more have also announced plans to slow hiring and cut costs amid the economic uncertainty.

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  • Wall Street Journal: Meta is planning significant layoffs | CNN Business

    Wall Street Journal: Meta is planning significant layoffs | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Facebook-parent Meta is planning the first significant layoffs in its history as the company grapples with a shrinking business and fears of a looming recession, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    The job cuts are expected to impact thousands of workers and could begin as early as this week, the Journal reported over the weekend, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. Meta has a headcount of more than 87,000, according to a September SEC filing.

    Meta declined to comment on the report.

    On a conference call last month to discuss its earnings results for the third quarter, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he expects the company to end 2023 “as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

    The possible cuts come as tightened advertiser budgets and Apple’s iOS privacy changes have weighed on Meta’s core business. The company last month posted its second quarterly revenue decline and reported that its profit was cut in half from the prior year. The drop in profitability is largely driven by the billions Meta is spending to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse that likely remains years away.

    Once boasting a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion last year, Meta is now valued at about $250 billion. (After reports of the job cuts, Meta’s stock opened more than 5% higher on Monday morning.)

    Meta is far from the only tech company said to be rethinking staffing. In a stunning shift for an industry sometimes thought of as untouchable, a number of tech companies have announced hiring freezes or job cuts in recent months, often after having seen rapid growth during the pandemic.

    Last week, rideshare company Lyft said it was axing 13% of employees, and payment-processing firm Stripe said it was cutting 14% of its staff. The same day, e-commerce giant Amazon said it was implementing a pause on corporate hiring.

    Facebook-rival Twitter made sweeping cuts across the company on Friday under its new owner, Elon Musk. The cuts impacted its ethical AI, marketing and communication, search and public policy team, among other departments.

    In the days since, however, Twitter

    (TWTR)     has reportedly asked dozens of laid off employees to return, according to Bloomberg.

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  • Twitter could be a new wild card for the midterms | CNN Business

    Twitter could be a new wild card for the midterms | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    For years, Twitter has been a leader in countering misinformation and protecting elections. It was often ahead of its peers in creating and enforcing new policies, and it was the first major platform to ban former President Donald Trump after the Capitol insurrection, pushing others to follow suit.

    But concerns are growing that tumult inside Twitter in the first week after it was acquired by Elon Musk could weaken its safeguards for elections, just before the midterms are set to take place.

    Musk’s Twitter laid off thousands of employees across the company last week, including cuts to its public policy and trust and safety teams, and extensive cuts to its curation team, which helps elevate reliable information on the platform about elections and other news events. The chaos was only amplified over the weekend as Twitter first appeared to roll out, and then postponed, a controversial plan allowing any user to pay to be verified — a proposal critics had said would cause confusion during the midterms about which accounts and tweets users could trust.

    Musk promised not to alter any of Twitter’s content policies until after the midterms. But the changes he has already made to the company have left it weakened and vulnerable, said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

    “The Musk-induced Category 5 hurricane at Twitter has the potential to disrupt the midterms,” Barrett said, “because large numbers of Twitter employees who otherwise would be paying attention to misuse of the platform have already been fired, are worrying that they’re next on the chopping block, or are distracted by the plight of co-workers being ushered out the door.”

    The threats Twitter could face on Election Day and its aftermath include known risks, such as misleading claims of election fraud, attempts at voter intimidation or violent rhetoric, Barrett said. But the disarray at Twitter also means the company will be even less equipped to identify and counter novel manipulation tactics for which there is no playbook, he added.

    US officials overseeing the election say there is so far no evidence of any specific or credible threats to election infrastructure, but made clear private platforms such as Twitter are on their own, and responsible for managing any misinformation that may appear on their sites.

    “We don’t flag anything to platforms around misinformation, disinformation,” Jen Easterly, director of the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told CNN Saturday evening. “That is entirely up to those platforms — Twitter, social media — based on their terms of service and how they enforce it.”

    Twitter has said it’s still committed to protecting elections and that the job cuts last week — which struck half of the company’s workforce — were less extensive in its trust and safety team, where about 15% of workers were let go. (Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, and attempts to reach one company spokesperson resulted in an email bounceback message that implied Twitter’s communications team was also affected by the layoffs.)

    But the company has been largely opaque about how exactly the layoffs may hinder Twitter’s ability to combat misinformation. When addressing the layoffs Friday, Yoel Roth, the company’s head of safety and integrity, said 80% of Twitter’s incoming content moderation volume had been “completely unaffected,” as was the daily volume of actions Twitter took to moderate content. But Roth was describing Twitter’s ability to moderate content in relation to an internal policy change made the week prior, not staffing cuts, and the period he referenced ended prior to the mass layoffs of Nov. 3 and 4.

    “With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority,” said Yoel Roth, the company’s head of safety and integrity, on Friday evening.

    But while Twitter’s cuts to its content moderation workforce may have been less severe than at other parts of the company, the broad layoffs in certain cases eliminated whole teams, some with important roles to play in election coverage.

    One of them was reportedly Twitter’s curation team, according to tweets by ex-employees, including Andrew Haigh, Twitter’s former senior curation lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The curation team had been responsible for the site’s Moments feature, which showcased important world events and explained to users why certain topics were trending.

    In recent years, Moments were increasingly being used to debunk misinformation or highlight major news stories, according to a person familiar with the inner workings of the curation team — in other words, the person said, “the type of coverage you’d want on election day.”

    Civil rights leaders have slammed the layoffs, saying that no matter what Twitter claims, the reduced headcount will impair Twitter’s ability to enforce its election policies even if the rules themselves have not changed.

    “He cannot enforce content moderation policies if he doesn’t have the staff to do so,” said Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press. (Roth said Friday evening that “front-line moderation staff” were among the least affected by the cuts.)

    Civil rights groups have spearheaded a campaign targeting Twitter’s largest advertisers, calling on them to pause their ad spend on the platform. Already this past week, major brands including General Mills and Audi have suspended their Twitter advertising, contributing to what Musk has called a steep revenue decline at the company.

    To shore up Twitter’s finances, Musk has proposed a paid verification feature enabling any user to pay $8 a month to receive a blue check mark on their profiles. But that too could lead to its own form of election chaos by making it harder to weed out misinformation.

    Twitter on Saturday appeared to roll out roll out an app update for iOS users on Saturday that suggested the feature was already live for users in the United States and other English-speaking countries.

    However, the product didn’t match the marketing — users found that while they could pay for the subscription service, Twitter Blue, the promised check marks did not appear on user profiles.

    Esther Crawford, a director of product management at Twitter, confirmed the service was not yet live, writing on Saturday in a tweet: “The new Blue isn’t live yet — the sprint to our launch continues but some folks may see us making updates because we are testing and pushing changes in real-time.”

    The company delayed the rollout of account verifications for its paid Twitter Blue subscription plan until after the midterm elections, a source with knowledge of the decision confirmed to CNN.

    But even if the changes don’t complicate Election Day itself, they could introduce added uncertainty in the critical period afterward as votes are counted – not to mention the 2024 presidential campaign, which could kick off later this month as Trump reportedly nears a formal announcement of his run.

    The sprint to roll out an untested feature opens the door to unintended consequences following the election, such as the potential impersonation of election officials, said civil rights groups.

    “Any right-wing troll can pay $8… get a blue check mark, and then change their name to CNN or Georgia’s secretary of state,” Rashad Robinson, CEO of Color of Change, told reporters on the call.

    Musk has argued that charging for a blue check mark will fight spammers by increasing their costs. But misinformation researchers have told CNN well-resourced adversaries, such as highly motivated state-backed actors looking to meddle in elections, would simply see the paid verification as another cost of doing business.

    Chris Krebs, the former CISA director, said Musk’s proposal changes the meaning of verification and alters the information that the symbol conveys to the user. “The verified logo has been a marker of trust I.e. ‘We’ve confirmed the person is who they say they are,’” Krebs tweeted. “Now it’s ‘we’re taking their $ & their word for it.’”

    The shakeup at Twitter has turned the company itself into an election wildcard.

    “My instinct is that the actual impacts of these changes may take a bit longer to be felt,” John Scott-Railton, a cybersecurity and disinformation researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “But they are going to be dramatic.”

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  • TikTok makes clear European data can be accessed by China-based employees | CNN Business

    TikTok makes clear European data can be accessed by China-based employees | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    TikTok updated its privacy policies for European users on Tuesday, adding explicit disclosures that personal data from the app may be viewed by employees in China.

    The update aligns with what TikTok executives have said publicly. But the addition reflects the intense scrutiny TikTok has faced over its international data flows.

    The announcement, which TikTok said was aimed at providing greater transparency, applies to users in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland — not the United States, though TikTok said it does store European users’ data in the US and in Singapore.

    In addition to China, TikTok data may be handled by employees in countries including Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the US, the company said. Access to European user data, TikTok added, is allowed for “certain employees within our corporate group” and is “based on a demonstrated need to do their job.”

    TikTok also said those employees’ access is governed by “robust security controls” and occurs “by way of methods that are recognized under the GDPR,” the European Union’s signature privacy law.

    “In order to operate a global platform designed for sharing joyful content, we rely on a global workforce to ensure that our community’s TikTok experience is consistent, enjoyable and safe,” Elaine Fox, TikTok’s head of privacy in Europe, wrote in the company’s announcement.

    US policymakers have grown increasingly vocal about concerns the Chinese government could pressure TikTok or its parent company, ByteDance, to hand over users’ personal data under the country’s national security laws.

    Amid those fears, TikTok has spent months negotiating with the federal government on a possible national security agreement that would allow it to continue operating in the United States. TikTok has also migrated US user data from proprietary servers in the US and Singapore to cloud-based servers hosted by Oracle.

    But that has not dampened criticism that user data could still be accessed by China-based individuals subject to that country’s security laws, a practice TikTok would not commit to stopping and further emphasized would continue with Tuesday’s European policy update.

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  • Mother seeks further investigation into death of sons who died after firefighters failed to properly search burning home | CNN

    Mother seeks further investigation into death of sons who died after firefighters failed to properly search burning home | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The mother of two boys who died following a house fire in Michigan earlier this year is pushing for an independent investigation after two firefighters were accused of lying about properly searching for survivors.

    Zyaire Mitchell, 12, and his brother Lamar, 9, died soon after a fire at their home in Flint on May 28.

    Several weeks later, an investigation led by the fire department found two firefighters tasked with the initial search of the room the children were in lied about properly sweeping for victims. Almost seven minutes later, the children were found by other firefighters. Both later died at a hospital from smoke inhalation, their mother said. State fire investigators ruled faulty electrical wiring caused the fire.

    In his July report, Flint Fire Department Chief Raymond Barton determined the two firefighters — Daniel Sniegocki and Michael Zlotek — should be terminated from the department, “due to the nature of the incident in question, and the actions or lack of action possibly contributing to the loss of life of two victims.”

    But instead, the city accepted the resignation of one of the firefighters and a second was “disciplined,” Barton said in August, without elaborating on what disciplinary actions were taken. On Friday, the city provided CNN with a copy of a letter sent to Zlotek dated July 28 detailing his two-week suspension.

    Barton refused to comment further on the investigation or its outcomes when contacted by CNN on Saturday.

    Attorney Robert Kenner, who is representing the boys’ mother, said he thinks there is an indication of racial bias in the way the investigation has been handled because the children were Black.

    “I can’t say in good faith that these firemen intentionally failed at their responsibility because these boys were African Americans, I would never say that,” Kenner said. “I think the way it was handled subsequent to the boys being found was a disparity in how others have been treated.”

    Speaking at a press conference Friday, the boys’ mother, Crystal Cooper, said, “Only if I could just give six minutes, my babies would still be here with me. I just want justice for them. They didn’t deserve this. Every day is a struggle knowing that I won’t see them anymore.”

    Kenner accused the city of a coverup and on Friday called for another investigation.

    “There was an investigation by a Chief Raymond Barton and, what he found, was that two firemen — Daniel Sniegocki and Michael Zlotek — fabricated and lied on a report and said that they checked the room,” Kenner said. “Based on what they said, the chief did his own investigation and what was uncovered was they couldn’t have checked the room, they didn’t even mention anything about a bed, the location of the bed, the location of items.”

    “No parent should ever have to go through this,” the attorney added. “No parent. So, what we’re calling for, we’re calling for a thorough investigation, an earnest investigation, no cover-ups, no change in documents. We’re calling for the truth.”

    Kenner on Saturday told CNN the decision not to terminate the firefighters came from the office of Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley.

    A representative of Flint Firefighters Local 352 told The Flint Journal that the two firefighters are being scapegoated in the matter because they failed to search a small room on the second floor of the home due to extreme heat and low visibility.

    CNN has reached out to the union for comment.

    “The mayor is in a hotly contested race right now and made the decision not to terminate based on political reasons,” Kenner claimed. “He’s tied to the fire union and didn’t want to upset the union or other constituents.”

    Neeley is facing former Mayor Karen Weaver in the election on Tuesday.

    Neeley, the mayor, told CNN, “There is absolutely no truth to the allegation that there is a cover up.”

    “We continue to lift this family in prayer, and we are sad to see their pain shamefully exploited,” he added.

    CNN has attempted to contact Zlotek and Daniel Sniegocki for comment.

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  • At least 38 injured, 2 critically, in a Manhattan apartment fire | CNN

    At least 38 injured, 2 critically, in a Manhattan apartment fire | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    At least 38 people were injured in a Manhattan apartment building fire Saturday morning, which authorities believe was caused by a lithium ion battery connected to a micromobility device.

    Of the injuries, two were critical, five were serious and the rest minor, Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh said in a news conference.

    Authorities received calls about fire and smoke at the building on East 52nd Street shortly before 10:30 a.m., the commissioner said. Fire units were on scene in “just over three minutes” after first receiving reports and encountered a “heavy fire condition” on the building’s 20th floor, FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Frank Leeb said during the news conference.

    Two civilians were rescued from the apartment with the fire, Leeb said. Fire personnel used ropes to make the rescues, he said.

    “Fire, EMS and dispatch did an extraordinary job rescuing a number of civilians, including an incredible roof rescue,” Kavanagh said, adding that fire personnel were working in “unbelievably dangerous conditions.”

    The blaze was “close to our 200th fire this year where the cause of the fire is a lithium ion battery from a micromobility device,” Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal, said.

    Authorities believe that the occupant in the apartment where the fire likely began had been repairing bikes in the building, Flynn said.

    The fire likely started “right behind the front door,” Flynn added. At least five bikes were recovered from the apartment, he said.

    “We are heading into the cold winter season, fires do go up, and so we really implore all New Yorkers to ensure that they and their families are safe,” Kavanagh, the fire commissioner, said. “We also want to emphasize the rising cause of fires from e-bikes and to ensure that families are making sure that they are following the safest possible way to use these, including not charging them overnight when they are asleep, including making sure they are certified and that the batteries that they are using are not damaged in any way.”

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  • Interest rates will keep rising. How high will they go? | CNN Business

    Interest rates will keep rising. How high will they go? | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? Analysts can speculate all they want, but Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision.

    That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.

    What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. “We have a ways to go,” said Powell of the Fed’s current hiking regime meant to fight persistent inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

    But Powell did add an important caveat. The Fed could start to slow the pace of those painful hikes as soon as December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.

    So what will the Fed be looking at between today and its next policy decision on December 14?

    The labor market: The Fed’s biggest worry is the super-tight US labor market, and Friday’s jobs report isn’t likely to soothe any nerves.

    The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.

    That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.

    There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment, that could be enough to placate Fed officials, even if the unemployment rate remains historically low.

    Inflation data: Expect new data from two major indexes that measure the pace of inflation ahead of the next Federal Reserve meeting.

    The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October, which tracks changes in the prices of a fixed set of goods and services, is out on November 10.

    Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

    The Fed will also get to see October data from its favored measure of inflation, Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), on December 1.

    PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.

    Core PCE climbed by 5.1% on an annual basis in September, higher than the August rate of 4.9% but below the consensus estimate of 5.2%, per Refinitiv.

    Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.

    The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.

    “The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”

    October’s new and existing home sales numbers, due on November 18 and 23, will show the continued impact of that policy ahead of the next meeting.

    The US economy is still standing strong in the face of rising interest rates, but things are softening much more quickly across the pond.

    The United Kingdom will face hard economic times and elevated interest rates well into next year, officials warned this week.

    The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.

    But the bank also issued a stark warning. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”

    A two-year recession would be longer than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, though the Bank of England said that any declines in GDP heading into 2024 would likely be relatively small.

    The central bank also doesn’t think inflation will start to fall back until next year. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.

    Elon Musk has been busy over at Twitter HQ. Aside from tweeting and deleting a conspiracy theory, he’s talked about implementing some big changes at his $44 billion acquisition. Here’s what’s happened so far:

    Layoffs begin: Elon Musk began laying off Twitter employees on Friday morning, according to a memo sent to staff. The email sent Thursday evening notified employees that they will receive a notice by 12 p.m. ET Friday that informs them of their employment status.

    The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

    Twitter had around 7,500 employees prior to Musk’s takeover.

    Several Twitter employees have already filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violate the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

    The WARN Act requires any company with over 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more at a “single site of employment.”

    Consolidating strength: In less than a week since Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations.

    Twitter’s board of directors was also dissolved last week, according to a securities filing.

    The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” That makes Musk, according to the filing, “the sole director of Twitter.”

    Cashing blue checks’ checks: Musk on Tuesday said he planned to charge $8 a month for Twitter’s subscription service, called “Twitter Blue,” with the promise to let anyone pay to receive a coveted blue check mark to verify their account. That’s a steep haircut from his original plan to charge users $19.99 a month to get or keep a verified account.

    In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

    Advertisers hit pause: Elon Musk wrote an open letter to advertisers just hours before cementing his acquisition of Twitter, explaining that he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.” But that attempt at reassuring the advertising industry, which makes up the vast majority of Twitter’s business, doesn’t appear to be working.

    General Mills

    (GIS)    , Mondelez International

    (MDLZ)    , Pfizer

    (PFE)     and Audi

    (AUDVF)     have reportedly joined a growing list of companies hitting pause on their Twitter advertising in the wake of Musk’s acquisition.

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter informs staff layoffs are set to begin | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s Twitter informs staff layoffs are set to begin | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees on Friday morning, according to a memo sent to staff. The email sent Thursday evening notified employees that they will receive a notice by 12 pm ET Friday that informs them of their employment status.

    “If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email,” a copy of the email obtained by CNN said. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”

    The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

    The email concluded acknowledging that it will be “an incredibly challenging experience to go through” for the workforce.

    The memo comes after news reports that Musk had planned to lay off up to half of the company’s staff after acquiring it last week for $44 billion.

    Twitter had around 7,500 employees prior to Musk’s takeover.

    Musk started his tenure at Twitter by firing CEO Parag Agrawal and two other executives, according to two people familiar with the decision.

    And in less than a week since Musk acquired the company, its C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations. Musk has also dissolved Twitter’s former board of directors.

    – Clare Duffy contributed to this report

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  • Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

    Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong/London
    CNN Business
     — 

    German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived in China on Friday with a team of top executives and a clear message: business with the world’s second largest economy must continue.

    Scholz met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People after landing in the capital Friday morning, according to a Chinese state media account. The German chancellor is also expected to meet with Premier Li Keqiang.

    Joining Scholz for the whirl-wind one day visit is a delegation of 12 German industry titans, including the CEOs of Volkswagen

    (VLKAF)    , Deutsche Bank

    (DB)    , Siemens

    (SIEGY)     and chemicals giant BASF

    (BASFY)    , according to a person familiar with the matter. They are set to meet with Chinese companies behind closed doors.

    The group entered China without participating in the usual seven-day hotel quarantine. Images showed hazmat-clad medical workers greeting their jet at Beijing’s Capital International Airport to test the official delegation for Covid-19.

    During the Friday morning meeting between the two leaders, Xi called for Germany and China to work together amid a “complex and volatile” international situation, and said the visit would “enhance mutual understanding and trust, deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields and plan for the next phase of Sino-German relations,” according to a readout from state broadcaster CCTV.

    Scholz’s visit — the first by a G7 leader to China in roughly three years — comes as Germany slides towards recession. But it has fired up concerns that the economic interests of Europe’s biggest economy are still too closely tied to those of Beijing.

    Since the invasion of Ukraine this year, Germany has been forced to ditch its long dependence on Russian energy. Now, some in Scholz’s coalition government are growing nervous about the country’s deepening ties with China. Beijing has declared its friendship with Russia has “no limits,” while China’s relations with the United States are deteriorating.

    The tension was highlighted recently by a fierce debate over a bid by Chinese state shipping giant Cosco to buy a 35% stake in the operator of one of the four terminals at the port of Hamburg. Under pressure from some members of the government, the size of the investment was limited to 24.9%.

    The potential deal has raised concerns in Germany that closer ties with China will leave critical infrastructure exposed to political pressure from Beijing, and disproportionately benefit Chinese companies.

    But Germany is hardly in a position to rock the boat with Beijing as it grapples with the challenge of reviving its struggling economy. Its consumers and companies have borne the brunt of Europe’s energy crisis, and a deep recession is looming.

    If the European Union and Germany were to decouple from China, it would lead to “large GDP losses” for the German economy, Lisandra Flach, director of the ifo Center for International Economics, told CNN Business.

    The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates that a major reduction in trade between the European Union and China would shave 1% off of Germany’s GDP.

    Germany needs to shore up its export markets as ties with Russia, once its main supplier of natural gas, continue to unravel.

    When it comes to China, Germany won’t want to “lose also this market, this economic partner,” said Rafal Ulatowski, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at the University of Warsaw.

    “They [will] try to keep these relations as long as it’s possible.”

    As Western countries have imposed swingeing economic sanctions on Russia, China has publicly maintained its “neutrality” in the war while ramping up its trade with Moscow.

    That has triggered a backlash in Europe, where some companies are already becoming wary of doing business in China because of its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions.

    Pressure on Berlin is also mounting over China’s human rights record. In an open letter Wednesday, a coalition of 70 civil rights groups urged Scholz to “rethink” his trip to Beijing.

    “The invitation of a German trade delegation to join your visit will be viewed as an indication that Germany is ready to deepen trade and economic links, at the cost of human rights and international law,” they wrote in the memo, published by the World Uyghur Congress. Based in Germany, the organization is run by Uyghurs raising awareness of allegations of genocide in China’s Xinjiang region.

    It suggested Berlin was “loosening economic dependence on one authoritarian power, only to deepen economic dependence on another.”

    In an op-ed published in a German newspaper on Wednesday, Scholz said he would use his visit to “address difficult issues,” including “respect for civil and political liberties and the rights of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province.”

    A spokesperson for the German government addressed wider criticism last week, saying at a press conference that it had no intention of “decoupling” from its most important trading partner.

    “[The chancellor] has basically said again and again that he is not a friend of decoupling, or turning away, from China. But he also says: diversify and minimize risk,” the spokesperson said.

    Last year, China was Germany’s biggest trading partner for the sixth year in a row, with the value of trade up over 15% from 2020, according to official statistics. Together, Chinese imports from, and exports to, Germany were worth €245 billion ($242 billion) in 2021.

    Still, the furore surrounding the Hamburg port deal is a reminder of the tradeoffs Germany has to confront if it wants to maintain close ties with such a vital export market and supplier.

    A spokesperson for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA), the company operating the port terminal, told CNN Business on Thursday that it was still negotiating the deal with Cosco.

    Flach, of the ifo Center for International Economics, said the deal warranted scrutiny because “there is no reciprocity: Germany cannot invest in Chinese ports, for instance.”

    A container ship from Cosco Shipping moored at the Tollerort Container Terminal owned by HHLA, in the harbor of Hamburg, Germany on Oct. 26.

    However, it is easy to overstate the impact of the potential agreement, said Alexander-Nikolai Sandkamp, assistant professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

    “We’re not talking about a 25% stake in the Hamburg harbor, or even the operator of the harbor, but a 25% stake in the operator of a terminal,” he told CNN Business.

    Jürgen Matthes, head of global and regional markets at the German Economic Institute, told CNN Business that critics were no longer simply weighing the business benefits of Chinese investment in the country.

    “Politics and economics have to be looked at together and cannot be taken separately any longer,” he said. “When geopolitics comes into play, the view of China has very much declined and become much more negative.”

    China’s recent treatment of Lithuania has also deepened concerns that Beijing “does not hesitate to simply break trade rules,” Matthes added. The small, Eastern European nation claimed last year that Beijing had erected trade barriers in retaliation for its support for Taiwan.

    China has defended its downgrading of relations with Lithuania, saying it is acting in response to the European nation undermining its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” This year, after a Lithuanian official visited Taiwan, Beijing also announced sanctions against her and vowed to “suspend all forms of exchange” with her ministry.

    As the German delegation touches down on Friday, they will be faced with another issue, which has become the single biggest headache for companies across China.

    “The biggest challenge for German businesses remains China’s zero-Covid policy,” said Maximilian Butek of the German Chamber of Commerce in China.

    “The restrictions are suffocating economic growth and heavily impact China’s attractiveness as a destination for foreign direct investment,” he told CNN Business.

    An aerial view of the urban landscape in Shanghai on Sept. 25. The city underwent a months-long Covid lockdown earlier this year.

    He said the broader restrictions were so stifling that some companies had moved their regional headquarters to other locations, such as Singapore. “Managing the whole region without being able to travel freely is almost impossible,” he added.

    In a brief statement, Volkswagen told CNN Business that its CEO was attending the trip since “there have been no direct meetings for almost three years” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    “In view of the completely changed geopolitical and global economic situation, the trip to Beijing offers the opportunity for a personal exchange of views,” the automaker said.

    Despite Beijing’s Covid curbs and geopolitical tensions, Germany has every economic incentive to stay close to China.

    Its dependency on China can be seen across industries. While about 12% of total imports came from China last year, the country was responsible for 80% of imported laptops and 70% of mobile phones, Sandkamp said.

    The automobile, chemical and electrical industries are also reliant on Chinese trade.

    “If we were to stop trading with China, we would run into trouble,” Sandkamp added.

    China made up 40% of Volkswagen’s worldwide deliveries in the first three quarters of this year, and it’s also the top market for other automakers such as Mercedes.

    Wariness among some German officials over the country’s closeness with China could filter into a more restrictive trade policy, though economic cooperation is still in both parties’ interests.

    Last week, Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck told Reuters that the government was efforting a new trade policy with China to reduce dependence on Chinese raw materials, batteries and semiconductors.

    Unidentified sources also told the news agency that the ministry was weighing new rules that would make business with China less attractive. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business.

    But “despite all odds and challenges, China remains unrivaled in terms of market size and market growth opportunities for many German companies,” said Butek, of the German Chamber.

    He predicted that “the large majority will stay committed to the Chinese market and is expecting to expand their business.”

    Companies appear to be toeing that line. Last week, BASF CEO Martin Brudermüller was quoted in Chinese state media as saying that Germans should “step away from China-bashing and look at ourselves a bit self-critically.”

    “We benefit from China’s policies of widening market access,” he said at a company event, according to state-run news agency Xinhua, pointing to the construction of a BASF chemical engineering site in southern China.

    — CNN’s Simone McCarthy, Chris Stern, Lauren Kent, Claudia Otto and Arnaud Siad contributed to this report.

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  • Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

    Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN Business
     — 

    Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, is wrestling with major disruption at its biggest iPhone assembly factory in China, as anxious workers reportedly flee the locked-down facility, according to social media videos.

    The Taiwanese company is racing to control a Covid outbreak at its campus in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

    The exodus is putting a tremendous strain on Foxconn just before the key holiday shopping season begins and highlights how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting international business.

    “[We] fully understand your eagerness to go back home,” Foxconn told its employees over the weekend, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account.

    “For employees who voluntarily stay in the company’s factory area, the port government and the company will jointly ensure everyone’s…health and safety,” it added.

    Analysts said the chaos at Zhengzhou could jeopardize Apple and Foxconn’s output in the coming weeks. Ivan Lam, senior research analyst at Counterpoint, estimated that between 10% and 30% of iPhone 14 production could be affected in the near term if the situation did not stabilize.

    The Zhengzhou campus is the world’s biggest iPhone factory and typically accounts for as much as 85% of iPhone assembly capacity, according to Lam’s estimates.

    A Foxconn spokesperson told Chinese state media that the company is trying to boost production at other sites.

    “At present, because now is the peak production season… [there is] a large demand for workers,” a Foxconn spokesperson told Henan Daily on Monday, adding that the company was “also coordinating back-up production capacity at other sites.”

    Foxconn and Apple did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

    Shares in Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, fell 2.6% on Tuesday.

    Videos of many people leaving Zhengzhou on foot have gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. The city, which has a population of more than 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures earlier last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases.

    State media has said that many Foxconn workers are among those walking miles to escape the city. Calling it a “helpless move for some employees,” a Foxconn manager told media outlet Yicai that workers are panicking over the spread of the virus at the factory and lack of access to official information.

    Foxconn said it was organizing vehicles for employees wishing to return home, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account over the weekend.

    The company has also quadrupled daily bonuses for workers at the plant this month, it said in a post on its official WeChat account on Tuesday.

    While these disruptions will impact iPhone production in the near term, analysts say it may not dent Apple’s iPhone shipments in the key holiday season.

    “I think in one to two weeks, things will get back to normal, given the current status,” Lam said.

    “They still have a lot of alternative production sites,” he said, adding that Foxconn had already begun shifting production to other facilities in China, such as in the southern province of Guangdong. “Things are under control now.”

    And, as Beijing shows few signs of moving away from its rigid Covid policies, Apple has started to boost production in other countries, including India, to reduce its dependence on China.

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  • 4 dead, including 10-month-old baby girl, in Bronx house fire, NYPD says | CNN

    4 dead, including 10-month-old baby girl, in Bronx house fire, NYPD says | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Four people, including a 10-month-old baby girl, were killed in a fire at a home in the Bronx early Sunday morning, the New York Police Department said.

    New York Fire Department Assistant Chief Kevin Brennan said firefighters immediately began removing victims from the building after responding to a report of a fire at the residence just after 6 a.m ET.

    Two boys, aged 10 and 12, were declared dead at the scene by emergency service workers. The baby girl and a 22-year-old man were rushed to a nearby hospital where they were later pronounced dead, according to the NYPD

    Police have not publicly released the identities of those killed and the cause of the fire, which will be determined by the fire marshal, is under investigation, according to the NYPD.

    A 21-year-old woman and a 41-year-old man were seriously injured and are currently being treated at an area hospital, police said.

    Several firefighters also suffered minor injuries, the FDNY said.

    Due to the “heavy fire” on the first and second floor, the incident was upgraded to a second-alarm fire, prompting the response of more than 100 firefighters and EMS personnel, according to the FDNY.

    The fire comes months after New York Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order in March on fire safety, after a separate fatal Bronx apartment building fire left 17 people dead in one of the deadliest fires in the city’s history.

    The executive order is designed to enhance fire safety enforcement, outreach efforts to educate New Yorkers, and identify safety violations, Adams announced in a news release at the time.

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