TV News LIES

A series of trades worth $800 million made minutes before a Truth Social post from Donald Trump sent markets swinging is an act of treason, one of America's most prominent economists has said.

An entity or several entities traded heavily on S&P 500 and oil futures, making an immense sum of money in the process.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman lashed out at the mystery traders.

"When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that's insider trading — which is illegal," Krugman wrote.

"But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit.

"That word is 'treason'."

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A jury on Friday found that Elon Musk misled Twitter’s shareholders by driving down Twitter’s stock price ahead of his $44 billion acquisition of the company in 2022.

The San Francisco jury were asked if two tweets and comments made by Musk on a podcast showed that he deliberately defrauded the shareholders and drove down Twitter’s stock price. They concluded that the tweets were false and misleading but did not hold him liable for the podcast comment.

The jury also dismissed the investors’ claim that Musk’s tweets and comments amounted to a scheme.

Four of the shareholders sued Musk in October 2022, claiming they suffered major losses as a result of Musk’s comments regarding spam bot accounts on Twitter, now the social platform X. The four shareholders’ lawyers said on Friday that Musk could now be forced to pay former shareholders around $2.5 billion, The New York Times reported.

“This is a great example of what you cannot do to the average investor –– people that have 401ks, kids, pension funds, teachers, firemen, nurses,” Joseph Cotchett, one of the investors’ attorneys, told CNBC. That’s what this case was all about. This was not about Musk. It was about the whole operation.”

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Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries are calling on global leaders to increase taxes on the super-rich, amid growing concern that the wealthiest in society are buying political influence.

An open letter, released to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, calls on global leaders attending this week’s conference to close the widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else.

The letter, signed by luminaries including the actor and film-maker Mark Ruffalo, the musician Brian Eno and the film producer and philanthropist Abigail Disney, says extreme wealth is polluting politics, driving social exclusion and fuelling the climate emergency.

"A handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies; taken over our governments; gagged the freedom of our media; placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation; deepened poverty and social exclusion; and accelerated the breakdown of our planet,” it reads. “What we treasure, rich and poor alike, is being eaten away by those intent on growing the gulf between their vast power and everyone else.

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The job market continues to show signs of cooling.

U.S. employers added just 64,000 jobs in November, according to a delayed report from the Labor Department Tuesday, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September. That's the highest unemployment rate in more than four years.

The jobs report was initially set to come out earlier this month, but the government's ability to monitor the job market was hampered by the six-week federal shutdown.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5645023/jobs-employment-labor-marketThat delayed job tallies for October and November, both of which were released on Tuesday. The report showed the U.S. saw a net loss of 105,000 jobs in October. That was led by a large drop in the federal workforce, as 162,000 government workers who'd taken buyouts earlier in the year were officially dropped from the payrolls.

Furloughed federal workers were unable to conduct their usual survey of households in October, so the unemployment rate for that month remains unknown.

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Thousands of Starbucks workers are gearing up to vote on whether to go on strike next week. 

The strike authorization vote is set to begin Friday and will remain open for several days, with Starbucks Workers United expected to share results after voting ends. Employees represented by the union have staged two national strikes over the last year, most recently in May to protest Starbucks' new dress code. Thousands of workers also walked off the job in December 2024.

As the voting gets underway, the union is also planning a series of rallies and pickets over the weekend outside Starbucks stores in dozens of U.S. cities.

Starbucks Workers United originated in Buffalo, New York, in 2021 and now represents 12,000 workers in approximately 550 Starbucks cafes across the country.

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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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