Following a week in which Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of factchecking, as of Friday the company is also terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, effective immediately. An internal memo from Meta acknowledged that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is…
The destruction caused by the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles is the worst the city has seen in recent history. The wildfires, which began on 7 January, have torched the US’s second largest city, leaving at least 10 dead and over 10,000 structures destroyed. Roughly 150,000 Los Angeles county residents remain under evacuation orders. While the…
The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for about 230,000 Salvadorans and 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US, in an effort to shield those groups from an incoming Trump administration that has promised to deport them. The decision in the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency came after immigrant advocates and lawmakers urged…
JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The US’s largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return…
More than 80 million people across southern US states were on alert on Friday as a powerful winter storm that dumped heavy snow and glazed roads with ice across much of Texas and Oklahoma lumbered eastward. Some governors have declared a state of emergency as the weather forced school closures across the region and unleashed…
The head of the Metropolitan police’s Black Police Association (MBPA) committed gross misconduct over his participation in a WhatsApp group that shared sexist comments and racist remarks about Asian people, a police tribunal has found. Insp Charles Ehikioya faces potential dismissal after Friday’s tribunal ruling at Palestra House in London. It found he was in…
The federal law to ban TikTok overwhelmingly passed the Senate and House last April. It came a year after Montana was the first state to ban TikTok, although a judge blocked that law on free speech grounds. The law, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, was signed by Joe Biden…
Mark Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of “pirated” versions of copyright-protected books to train the company’s artificial intelligence models, a group of authors has alleged in a US court filing. Citing internal Meta communications, the filing claims that the social network company’s chief executive backed the use of the LibGen dataset, a vast online archive of…
South African police have rescued 26 Ethiopians from a suspected human trafficking ring in Johannesburg after the group broke a window and burglar bar to escape from a house where they were being held naked. Three people were arrested on suspicion of people trafficking and possessing an illegal firearm on Thursday night after neighbours in…
England should be allowed to play next month’s cricket match against Afghanistan, the culture and sport secretary has said, despite calls for a boycott over the Taliban government’s treatment of women. Lisa Nandy backed a decision by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to allow the game to go ahead, saying on Friday that…
