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 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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Procter & Gamble will cut up to 7,000 jobs, or approximately 6% of its global workforce, in the next two years as the maker of Tide detergent and Pampers diapers wrestles with tariff-related costs and customers who have grown anxious about the economy.

The job cuts, announced at the Deutsche Bank consumer conference in Paris on Thursday, make up about 15% of its current non-manufacturing workforce, said chief financial officer Andre Schulten.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

In a series of departures announced in a matter of weeks, the agency’s entire top rung is set to turn over as Brian Quintenz, President Trump’s nominee for CFTC chair, prepares to take the reins.

Commissioners Summer Mersinger and Christy Goldsmith Romero both plan to depart by the end of the week, while fellow Commissioner Kristin Johnson has said she will leave “later this year.”

Acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham has promised to remain at the agency until Quintenz is confirmed, at which time she too will depart. The commission, which typically has five members, has been short one person since former Chair Rostin Behnam stepped down in January.

The relatively low-profile agency is expected to play a key role in regulating the digital asset market alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

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The Department of Education under President Donald Trump began sending notices to the first of millions of Americans with past-due federal student loans that they will see their wages garnished in just a few months. The news comes the week that the Trump administration begins to send millions of defaulted borrowers into collections.

The garnishments will happen in waves, with the first borrowers seeing the pay deductions in early June. Monday, the Education Department started sending 30-day notices to around 195,000 defaulted borrowers to notify them that they will be subject to the Treasury Offset Program, which collects past-due debts owed to state and federal agencies. Under this program, Treasury can withhold money including tax refunds, wages, Social Security payments, and disability benefits to pay delinquent debt.

Later this summer, "all 5.3 million defaulted borrowers will receive a notice from Treasury that their earnings will be subject to administrative wage garnishment," the department says in its first timeline of the enforcement action.

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President Trump has played down the shock impact of his tariff shift on markets, which kept spiraling downward on Friday as fears for the global economy grew.

US trading partners have vowed to retaliate after Trump ended months of suspense on Wednesday by revealing broad reciprocal duties on all countries, in what he has referred to as "Liberation Day." On Friday, China announced it will impose countermeasures against the US starting April 10, including a 34% tariff on US goods.

Trump's administration is imposing a baseline tariff of 10% across all countries beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. The US is upping those duties for various partners whom he described as bad actors starting next Wednesday, April 9.

Trump vowed to "never change" his policies on Friday, even as he touted progress with Vietnam, a country set to see one of the biggest US tariff hits.

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