WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on Wednesday that the company will cut 10,000 jobs or nearly 5% of its workforce in the third quarter of 2023 to align its cost structure with its revenue.
“[W]e will align our cost structure with our revenue and where we see customer demand. Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10.000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3. This represents less than 5 percent of our total employee base, with some notifications happening today,” Nadella said in a memorandum to Microsoft employees filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
At the same time, Microsoft will continue to hire and invest in “strategic areas” to provide for its long-term competitiveness, the memorandum said.
Microsoft will spend $1.2 billion in the second quarter of the year to cover costs associated with severance pay, hardware upgrade and the lease consolidation, the memorandum added.
The tech giant will become another major tech corporation in the United States that resorted to staff reductions over the last 12 months amid the global economic slowdown. Other companies that have implemented significant workforce reductions or plan to do so soon include Twitter, Amazon and HP among others.
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
