TV News LIES

Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The company announced the cuts in a memo from its chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted.

However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs,underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said.

Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company’s new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang’s role in steering the company’s AI strategy.

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The White House budget director, Russell Vought, said on Friday that the Trump administration will freeze another $11bn worth of infrastructure projects in Democratic states due to the ongoing government shutdown.

Vought said on social media the US army corps of engineers would pause work on “low priority” projects in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He said the projects could eventually be canceled.

The White House office of management and budget (OMB) said Donald Trump “wants to reorient how the federal government prioritizes Army Corps projects”.

The Trump administration has already frozen at least $28bn meant for transportation and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states, as the president pressures his opponents in Congress to end the shutdown, which began on 1 October.

Trump has also vowed to cut “Democrat agencies” and has sought to eliminate 4,100 federal jobs as he looks to inflict pain on his political opposition.

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President Trump's administration for now must stop firing workers during the government shutdown, a federal judge ordered on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said the cuts appeared to be politically motivated and were being carried out without much thought.

"It's very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost," she said. "It's a human cost that cannot be tolerated."

She granted a temporary restraining order blocking the job cuts, saying she believed the evidence would ultimately show the cuts were illegal and in excess of authority.

The judge's decision came after federal agencies on Friday started issuing layoff notices aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.

The layoff notices are part of an effort by the Trump administration to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers as the government shutdown continues. Russell Vought, the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said earlier Wednesday that the number of layoffs could reach more than 10,000.

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The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a trio of researchers Monday for their work on how cycles of technological innovation feed economic growth.

Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, Peter Howitt of Brown University and Philippe Aghion of the College of France and the London School of Economics will split the prize money of 11 million Swedish kroner, or about $1.2 million.

All three men were born outside the United States, but each received his doctorate from a university in the U.S.

Mokyr pioneered a theory of how technological change and improvement has helped to fuel two centuries of growth and higher living standards. Howitt and Aghion followed up with a theory on how creative destruction allows one technological advance to give way to another, so what's a breakthrough in one generation is obsolete by the next.

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President Trump announced Friday he will raise tariffs on China in response to a move from Beijing to tighten its control over certain critical minerals and rare earth elements.

Trump announced on Truth Social that he would impose a tariff of 100 percent on Chinese goods beginning Nov. 1 or sooner. Those tariffs will supersede existing duties already in place on Chinese goods.

The president said his administration would also place export controls “on any and all critical software.”

“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History,” Trump posted.

China announced this week that foreign entities must obtain a license in order to export any products containing more than 0.1 percent of rare earths that are either sourced in China or manufactured using the country’s extraction process. China controls roughly 70 percent of the world’s rare metals and earths.

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The Supreme Court said President Donald Trump must allow Lisa Cook to remain on the Federal Reserve for now, rejecting his bid to immediately fire her from the central bank, which has broad influence over the economy through its interest rate decisions.

Rather than grant Trump’s emergency request for her to be fired, the high court said it would hear oral arguments on the issue in January.

The justices are already set to consider a similar case on the Federal Trade Commission, which raises the issue of whether Congress or the courts can protect leaders of independent agencies from removal by the president.

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