- US and Philippine forces sink a ship during largescale drills in the disputed South China Sea The Associated Press
- VIDEO: Marine ACVs Make Operational Premiere in Balikatan 2024 Exercise – USNI News USNI News
- US AC-130J Ghostrider Destroys Chinese ‘Fishing Boat’ In Rare Military Drills Targeting Notorious Vessels EurAsian Times
- Philippine, US, Australian forces show off combined fires capabilities, destroy ship in Balikatan training event DVIDS
- US-Philippines Balikatan drills simulate conflicts over Taiwan, South China Sea South China Morning Post
Tag Archives: Largescale
Ethiopia: Mass killings continue, risk of further ‘large-scale’ atrocities – UN News
- Ethiopia: Mass killings continue, risk of further ‘large-scale’ atrocities UN News
- UN experts say Ethiopia’s conflict and Tigray fighting left over 10000 survivors of sexual violence The Associated Press
- UN experts say war crimes committed in Ethiopia despite formal end to conflict Yahoo News
- Ethiopia: UN Human Rights Council must renew the mandate of its investigative body as crisis spreads to other parts of the country. Amnesty International
- UN experts say Ethiopia’s conflict and Tigray fighting left over 10,000 survivors of sexual violence ABC News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
China ‘ready to fight’ after 3 days of large-scale military drills around Taiwan – ABC News
- China ‘ready to fight’ after 3 days of large-scale military drills around Taiwan ABC News
- A day after war games: Why are Chinese warships lingering around Taiwan? | DW News DW News
- US very ‘confident’ it can protect interests in South China Sea as China surrounds Taiwan Fox News
- U.S., Chinese Aircraft Carriers Operating Near Taiwan, Chinese Carrier Shandong Launched 80 Fighter Missions in Weekend Drills – USNI News USNI News
- Military exercises suggest China is getting ‘ready to launch a war against Taiwan,’ Taiwanese foreign minister tells CNN CNN
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Facebook Parent Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layoffs This Week
Meta Platforms Inc.
META 2.11%
is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, according to people familiar with the matter, in what could be among the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry’s rapid growth during the pandemic.
The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.
The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company’s staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech industry retrenchment.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said recently that ‘some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.’
Photo:
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News
A spokesman for Meta declined to comment, referring to Chief Executive
Mark Zuckerberg’s
recent statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” he said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Meta was planning to cut expenses by at least 10% in the coming months, in part through staff reductions.
The cuts expected to be announced this week follow several months of more targeted staffing reductions in which employees were managed out or saw their roles eliminated.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees at a companywide meeting at the end of June.
Meta, like other tech giants, went on a hiring spree during the pandemic as life and business shifted more online. It added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021, and added an additional 15,344 in the first nine months of this year—about a fourth of that in the most recent quarter.
Meta’s stock has fallen by more than 70% this year. The company has highlighted deteriorating macroeconomic trends, but investors have also been spooked by its high spending and threats to the company’s core social-media business. Growth for that business in many markets has stalled amid stiff competition from TikTok, and
Apple Inc.’s
requirement that users opt-in to the tracking of their devices has curtailed the ability of social-media platforms to target ads.
Last month, investment firm Altimeter Capital said in an open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg that Meta should slash staff and pare back its metaverse ambitions, reflecting the rising discontent among shareholders.
Meta’s expenses have also risen sharply, causing its free cash flow to decline by 98% in the most recent quarter. Some of the company’s spending stems from heavy investments in the additional computing power and artificial intelligence needed to further develop Reels, Meta’s TikTok-like short-form video platform on Instagram, and to target ads with less data.
But much of Meta’s ballooning costs stem from Mr. Zuckerberg’s commitment to Reality Labs, a division of the company responsible for both virtual and augmented reality headsets as well as the creation of the metaverse. Mr. Zuckerberg has billed the metaverse as a constellation of interlocking virtual worlds in which people will eventually work, play, live and shop.
Meta has invested heavily in promoting its virtual-reality platform, but users have been largely unimpressed.
Photo:
Guillermo Gutierrez/Zuma Press
The effort has cost the company $15 billion since the beginning of last year. But despite investing heavily in promoting its virtual-reality platform, Horizon Worlds, users have been largely unimpressed. Last month, the Journal reported that visitors to Horizon Worlds had fallen over the course of the year to well under 200,000 users, about the size of Sioux Falls.
“I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Mr. Zuckerberg told analysts on the company’s earnings call last month before reaffirming his commitment. “I think people are going to look back on decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.”
Following the call, analysts downgraded their rating of Meta’s stock and slashed price targets.
“Management’s road map & justification for this strategy continue to not resonate with investors,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets said in a note last month.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at jeff.horwitz@wsj.com and Salvador Rodriguez at salvador.rodriguez@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
US to launch large-scale joint border op with Mexico to combat migrant surge
FIRST ON FOX: The Biden administration is launching a new large-scale border enforcement operation with Mexico in order to combat the ongoing crisis at the southern border, Fox News Digital has learned — an operation that includes increases in checkpoints, resources and a crackdown of human smuggling operations.
The Biden administration will immediately begin returning Venezuelan nationals who entered illegally to Mexico, a source familiar with the plans told Fox News Digital. The U.S. has seen a surge in the number of migrants coming to the U.S. from the authoritarian regime, and until now has been unable to return migrants under the Title 42 public health order due to a lack of diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Mexico’s refusal to take Venezuelan nationals.
The U.S. and Mexico are also launching a large-scale border enforcement campaign. That includes new checkpoints for migrants, collaboration with targeting human smuggling operations and a surge in resources and law enforcement personnel.
The source said that the operation will also see increased information-sharing between the two countries on how transnational criminal organizations are using stash houses and staging locations and are transporting migrants through Mexico and into the U.S.
Venezuelan migrants walk along the U.S. border fence after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to turn themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 22, 2022.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Biden administration has been stressing the importance of a hemisphere-wide approach to the migrant crisis, and has been pushing for greater collaboration between nations in dealing with migration.
In June, President Biden attended the Summit of the Americas in June, along with a number of Western Hemisphere leaders, and unveiled a new migration declaration that Biden said would transform the regional approach to migration.
The approach included a slew of new migration-related commitments and spending from the U.S. and other countries, including Mexico.
The U.S. has seen more than 2.1 million migrant encounters this fiscal year, with more than 200,000 encountered in August alone. According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, encounters with migrants from Mexico and Central America were down for the third month in a row, accounting for just 36% of unique encounters, while 55,333 unique encounters were from the totalitarian regimes of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, a 175% increase over last year.
This is a breaking news story; check back for updates.
Large-Scale Study Confirms Which Type of Immunity Best Protects Against COVID
People with the “hybrid immunity” of having been both fully vaccinated and previously infected with COVID-19 have the strongest protection against the virus, two new studies said on Friday.
After two years of a pandemic that has seen nearly 500 million people infected and billions vaccinated, the studies highlighted the importance of getting jabbed for those who have natural immunity after recovering from the disease.
One of the two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal analyzed the health data of more than 200,000 people in 2020 and 2021 in hard-hit Brazil, which has the world’s second-largest COVID death toll.
It found that for people who have already had COVID, Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s vaccines offered 90 percent effectiveness against hospitalization and death, China’s CoronaVac had 81 percent and Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot jab had 58 percent.
“All four of these vaccines have proven to provide significant extra protection for those with a previous COVID-19 infection,” said study author Julio Croda of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul.
“Hybrid immunity due to exposure to natural infection and vaccination is likely to be the norm globally and might provide long-term protection even against emerging variants,” Pramod Kumar Garg of India’s Translational Health Science and Technology Institute said in a comment piece linked to the study.
A study using Sweden’s nationwide register up to October 2021 meanwhile found that people who recovered from COVID retained a high level of protection against re-infection for up to 20 months.
And people with two-vaccine-dose hybrid immunity had a further 66 percent lower risk of re-infection than those with just natural immunity.
Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia who was not involved in the study, told AFP that the 20 months of “very good protection” from natural immunity was “far better than we would expect for the original two-dose vaccine schedule”.
But he cautioned that both studies were completed before the Omicron variant became dominant across the world, and that it had “notably dropped the protective value of a prior infection”.
A study in Qatar published on the medRxiv pre-publication website last week gave an insight into the protection offered by hybrid immunity against Omicron.
Immunity https://t.co/ClKLHywmTT pic.twitter.com/o2V2QTz3Op
— Randall Munroe (@xkcd) December 20, 2021
It found that three vaccine doses had 52 percent effectiveness against symptomatic infection of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant – but that number jumped to 77 percent when the patient had been previously infected.
The study, which has not been peer reviewed, found that “hybrid immunity resulting from prior infection and recent booster vaccination confers the strongest protection” against both the BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants.
© Agence France-Presse
Large-Scale Study Reveals Strange Link Between Antibiotics And Cognitive Decline
A study involving a total of 14,542 women has found an as-yet-unexplained link between taking antibiotics for at least two months in midlife, and a dip in cognitive score assessments taken several years later.
The team behind the research, led by epidemiologists from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, says it shows how important it is to carefully monitor antibiotic use – and also how important it is that we understand the link between what’s going on in our guts (which antibiotics can affect) and what’s happening in our brains.
Plenty of previous studies have highlighted the link between the gut microbiome and the brain, but it’s not clear exactly what the relationship might be. This new research adds more data points in a much-needed field of study.
“In a cohort of over 14,000 women, we observed that antibiotic use in midlife was significantly associated with subsequent poorer scores for global cognition, learning, and working memory, and psychomotor speed and attention,” write the researchers in their paper.
“To our knowledge, our study represents the first large study of chronic long-term use of antibiotics and subsequent cognition.”
The women in the cohort (a long-term chronic disease research project called Nurses’ Health Study) had taken antibiotic drugs for a variety of reasons, including for respiratory infections, dental problems, acne, and urinary tract infections.
For those on antibiotics, the resulting drop in brain power across the various categories of learning, response, and memory was the equivalent of about three or four years of normal aging, according to the data.
Cognitive ability was assessed an average of seven years after the antibiotic use began, through an online test the participants completed at home. The test includes four different tasks in total, designed to measure different aspects of cognitive performance.
“This relationship was associated with longer duration of antibiotic use and persisted after adjustment for many potential confounding factors,” write the researchers.
As usual with studies such as this, the link isn’t enough to prove causation – that is, the data don’t show it’s definitely antibiotic use that’s leading to a drop in cognition. It’s possible that the conditions the antibiotics were intended to treat, rather than the antibiotics themselves, caused this small drop in cognition, for example.
However, there is enough here to suggest that more research is definitely warranted. The limitations of this study are that it didn’t look at any particular type of antibiotic and that it relied on self-reporting for antibiotic use. However, the large sample size and the factoring in of other variables, including diet and other medications, increase its value.
Investigations into the link between antibiotics, gut microbiome, and brain function will continue, but to date, this is one of the best studies we’ve got looking at the potential long-term effects in adult human beings.
“Given the profound effect of antibiotic use on the gut microbiome – with prior studies showing alterations in functional potential at two and four years after antibiotic exposure – the gut-brain axis could be a possible mechanism for linking antibiotics to cognitive function,” write the researchers.
The research has been published in PLOS One.
Russia central bank warns of ‘large-scale structural’ economic transformation
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council via a video link at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia February 18, 2022.
Mikhail Klimentyev | Sputnik | via Reuters
The Central Bank of Russia on Friday held its monetary policy steady and maintained its key interest rate at 20%, but warned of considerable uncertainty as the economy undergoes a “large-scale structural transformation.”
In late February, shortly after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the CBR more than doubled the country’s key interest rate from 9.5% to 20% in an effort to prop up its plunging currency and mitigate the impact of tough international sanctions.
In its statement Friday, the CBR said the sharp increase in its key rate had “helped sustain financial stability.”
“The Russian economy is entering the phase of a large-scale structural transformation, which will be accompanied by a temporary but inevitable period of increased inflation, mainly related to adjustments of relative prices across a wide range of goods and services,” it said.
“The Bank of Russia’s monetary policy is set to enable a gradual adaptation of the economy to new conditions and a return of annual inflation to 4% in 2024.”
The ruble sank to record lows against the dollar on the back of a barrage of new sanctions and penalties imposed on Moscow by the U.S. and European allies, before moderating in recent weeks. The currency sat at just over 104 to the dollar following the decision on Friday.
Earlier this week, Russia managed to stave off a historic debt default by completing some of its sovereign bond payments in dollars, Reuters reported. The Russian finance ministry said on Friday that it had met its obligations to pay coupons on dollar-denominated eurobonds in full.
The CBR’s large quantities of foreign currency reserves were targeted by western sanctions that aimed to render them almost inaccessible, preventing policymakers from mitigating the depreciation in domestic assets.
Three takeaways
While the decision was expected, the central bank’s statement gave some insight into how it views the economic outlook for Russia at present.
William Jackson, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said there were three key takeaways, the first of which was that the central bank seems to think it has done enough with last month’s emergency hike to stabilize the financial system and prevent a run on Russian banks.
“Second, the CBR sees sanctions and a shift by the Russian government towards autarky and isolationism as something that is here for the long haul,” Jackson said, noting that the statement mentioned the “large-scale structural transformation” on several occasions.
“And third, despite that, policymakers at the CBR are trying to maintain a semblance of macroeconomic orthodoxy. The over-riding focus of the statement was on the balance of inflation risks and that monetary policy would remain tight to prevent second-round effects from the current inflation spike from taking hold.”
This may indicate that policymakers aim to roll back the current capital controls, revert to a floating ruble and return the focus of monetary policy to inflation-targeting eventually, Jackson suggested.
New technology lays groundwork for large-scale, high-resolution 3D displays
Researchers have developed a prototype display that uses projection to create large-scale 3D images with ultra-high definition. The new approach helps overcome the limitations of light-field projection, which can create natural-looking 3D images that don’t require special 3D glasses for viewing.
“Our optical design could make it practical to replace 2D flat panel displays with 3D images for digital signs, entertainment, education and other applications where 3D images provide a significant enhancement,” said research team leader Byoungho Lee from Seoul National University in Korea. “Our design could also be modified to provide immersive experiences in movie theaters, for example.”
In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, the researchers describe how they combine two different light-field display technologies to project large-scale 3D images with almost diffraction-limited resolution. The new display is autostereoscopic, which means that it produces different 3D images so that the image can be viewed from various angles.
“We developed a way to carry out all the display processes optically without any digital processing,” said Lee. “This compensates for the limitations of each display technology to allow the creation of high-resolution 3D images on a large screen.”
Combining technologies
Light-field displays work by reproducing light that is reflected from an object in a way that corresponds to the actual visible position. Because autostereoscopic light field displays produce different images for different viewing angles, they require a huge amount of information to be processed. This demand creates a tradeoff between resolution and the size of the displayed image because the hardware of the display gets overwhelmed by the amount of information required.
To overcome this limitation, the researchers designed a new optical configuration that combines a multifocal display with integral imaging. Typically, a multifocal display can generate a high-quality volumetric image, but it is technically difficult to implement on a large-screen system. On the other hand, integral imaging is better at enlarging images.
In the new design, the multifocal display generates a high-resolution 3D, or volumetric, scene while the integral imaging technology enlarges it for viewing on a large screen. The information conversion between the multifocal display and integral imaging is all performed optically without any digital processing.
“Our method goes beyond merely combining two existing methods to achieving an ultrahigh-definition volumetric light-field display with almost diffraction-limited resolution,” said Lee. “We also found a way to effectively resolve the difficulty of enlarging a volumetric scene and overcame problems with information loss that tend to affect integral imaging.”
Large and high-resolution 3D images
After verifying the resolution of their prototype system, the researchers qualitatively confirmed that a volumetric image was reconstructed. The tests showed that the prototype can synthesize a volumetric image of 21.4 cm x 21.4 cm x 32 cm, which is equivalent to 28.6 megapixels and 36 times higher resolution than the original image.
“Our approach is very efficient at processing information, which enables a low computing cost as well as simple, high-quality, real-time system configuration,” said Lee. “The optical design can also be seamlessly integrated with various techniques used in existing light-field displays.”
The researchers are now working to optimize the optics and further reduce the complexity of the multifocal display to make the projector more compact. They note that because the system is a fusion of two different technologies, the performance of their proposed system will likely improve as each technology develops.
Using nanoscale 3D printing to create high-resolution light field prints
More information:
Youngjin Jo et al, Ultrahigh-definition volumetric light field projection, Optics Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1364/OL.431156
Youngjin Jo et al, Ultrahigh-definition volumetric light field projection, Optics Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1364/OL.431156
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Drought puts Amazon at risk of ‘large-scale dieback’, researchers warn
Increasingly severe climate conditions threaten to accelerate a “large scale dieback” of the Amazon rainforest, according to the authors of a new study finding that 2.5bn trees perished in the biome following a drought several years ago.
Central Brazil is currently reeling from the worst drought in 100 years, which has triggered water shortages and the risk of power blackouts. The southern reaches of the world’s largest rainforest are forecast to be hit by the dry spell later this year.
A joint group of UK and Brazilian scientists have warned that tree loss caused by these extreme dry spells can push the rainforest past its so-called “tipping point”, the threshold at which it can no longer sustain its water recycling ecosystem. This would cause more trees to perish and trigger sharp climate fluctuations across Latin America.
“With droughts becoming more common and more intense, this means more tree mortality and less water being recycled. This could lead to a large-scale dieback,” said Erika Berenguer, a Brazilian researcher at the universities of Oxford and Lancaster.
In an eight-year study released on Monday, Berenguer’s team found that droughts and wildfires following the 2015-16 El Niño caused the death of more than 2.5bn trees and woody vines in the most affected area of the rainforest.
By comparison, 129m trees are estimated to have perished in California since 2010 because of droughts and wildfires, according to the US Forest Service.
According to the UK-Brazil study, the destruction of the forest resulted in almost 500m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. The mortality rates of trees was also higher than expected for three years following the drought.
“After three years, only around a third of the emissions were reabsorbed by plant growth in the forest. This shows that the Amazon’s vital function as a carbon sink can be hampered for years following these drought events,” the researchers said.
Scientists have generally worried that the Amazon would cross its “tipping point” as a result of human-led deforestation, which has soared during the rightwing Jair Bolsonaro’s administration in Brazil. Some environmental campaigners also believe the country’s ongoing drought is directly linked to the surging deforestation in the Amazon.
The rainforest has long been considered a crucial buffer against climate change, with billions of trees acting as a giant sink for carbon emissions.
A series of new studies, however, including one published last week in Nature, suggest that parts of the biome are now releasing more carbon than they are absorbing as a result of deforestation and farmers using fire to clear land.
Berenguer also highlighted how the drying of the forest makes it more susceptible to fires set by farmers, which she said cause six times more carbon emissions compared with trees that are only affected by drought.
The study was conducted by gathering data from 21 plots of primary forest, secondary regrowing forest and forests that had been logged, with results extrapolated to the region.
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