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Amazon cuts about 16,000 corporate jobs in the latest round of layoffs
Court News |
2026/01/28 06:54
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Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.
The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.
Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur.
The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.
She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.
“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Galetti said.
CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively cut costs since succeeding founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, said in June that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.
The layoffs announced Wednesday are Amazon’s biggest since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, Amazon and other Big Tech and retail companies have cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line following the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s workforce doubled as millions stayed home and boosted online spending.
The job cuts have not arrived with a company on shaky financial ground.
In its most recent quarter, Amazon’s profits jumped nearly 40% to about $21 billion and revenue soared to more than $180 billion.
Late last year after layoffs, Jassy said job cuts weren’t driven by company finances or AI.
“It’s culture,” he said in October. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”
Hiring has stagnated in the U.S. and in December, the country added a meager 50,000 jobs, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November.
Labor data points to a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.
While economists have described the labor situation in the U.S as a “no hire-no fire” environment, some companies have said they are cutting back on jobs, even this week.
On Tuesday, UPS said it planned to cut up to 30,000 operational jobs through attrition and buyouts this year as the package delivery company reduces the number of shipments from what was its largest customer, Amazon.
That followed 34,000 job cuts in October at UPS and the closing of daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during the first nine months of last year.
Also on Tuesday, Pinterest said it plans to lay off under 15% of its workforce, as part of broader restructuring that arrives as the image-sharing platform pivots more of its money to artificial intelligence.
Shares of Amazon Inc., based in Seattle, rose slightly before the opening bell Wednesday.
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A South Korean court sentences former President Yoon to 5 years in prison
Court News |
2026/01/12 08:12
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A South Korean court sentenced former President Yoon Suk Yeol to five years in prison Friday in the first verdict from eight criminal trials over the martial law debacle that forced him out of office and other allegations.
Yoon was impeached, arrested and dismissed as president after his short-lived imposition of martial law in December 2024 triggered huge public protests calling for his ouster.
The most significant criminal charge against him alleges that his martial law enforcement amounted to a rebellion, An independent counsel has requested the death sentence over that charge, and the Seoul Central District Court will decide on that in a ruling on Feb. 19.
Yoon has maintained he didn’t intend to place the country under military rule for an extended period, saying his decree was only meant to inform the people about the danger of the liberal-controlled parliament obstructing his agenda. But investigators have viewed Yoon’s decree as an attempt to bolster and prolong his rule, charging him with rebellion, abuse of power and other criminal offenses.
In Friday’s case, the Seoul court sentenced Yoon for defying attempts to detain him and fabricating the martial law proclamation. He was also sentenced for sidestepping a legally mandated full Cabinet meeting, which deprived some Cabinet members who were not convened of their rights to deliberate on his decree.
Judge Baek Dae-hyun said in the televised ruling that imposing “a heavy punishment” was necessary because Yoon hasn’t shown remorse and has only repeated “hard-to-comprehend excuses.” The judge also said restoring legal systems damaged by Yoon’s action was necessary.
Yoon’s defense team said they will appeal the ruling, which they believe was “politicized” and reflected “the unilateral arguments by the independent counsel.” Yoon’s defense team argued the ruling “oversimplified the boundary between the exercise of the president’s constitutional powers and criminal liability.”
Park SungBae, a lawyer who specializes in criminal law, said there is little chance the court would decide Yoon should face the death penalty in the rebellion case. He said the court will likely issue a life sentence or a sentence of 30 years or more in prison.
South Korea has maintained a de facto moratorium on executions since 1997 and courts rarely hand down death sentences. Park said the court would take into account that Yoon’s decree didn’t cause casualties and didn’t last long, although Yoon hasn’t shown genuine remorse for his action.
South Korea has a history of pardoning former presidents who were jailed over diverse crimes in the name of promoting national unity. Those pardoned include strongman Chun Doo-hwan, who received the death penalty at a district court over his 1979 coup, the bloody 1980 crackdowns of pro-democracy protests that killed about 200 people, and other crimes.
Even if Yoon is spared the death penalty or life imprisonment at the rebellion trial, he may still face other prison sentences in the multiple smaller trials he faces.
Some observers say Yoon is likely retaining a defiant attitude in the ongoing trials to maintain his support base in the belief that he cannot avoid a lengthy sentence but could be pardoned in the future.
On the night of Dec. 3, 2024, Yoon abruptly declared martial law in a televised speech, saying he would eliminate “anti-state forces” and protect “the constitutional democratic order.” Yoon sent troops and police officers to encircle the National Assembly, but many apparently didn’t aggressively cordon off the area, allowing enough lawmakers to get into an assembly hall to vote down Yoon’s decree.
No major violence occurred, but Yoon’s decree caused the biggest political crisis in South Korea in decades and rattled its diplomacy and financial markets. For many, his decree, the first of its kind in more than 40 years in South Korea, brought back harrowing memories of past dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, when military-backed leaders used martial law and emergency measures to deploy soldiers and tanks on the streets to suppress demonstrations.
After Yoon’s ouster, his liberal rival Lee Jae Myung became president via a snap election last June. After taking office, Lee appointed three independent counsels to look into allegations involving Yoon, his wife and associates.
Yoon’s other trials deal with charges like ordering drone flights over North Korea to deliberately inflame animosities to look for a pretext to declare martial law. Other charges accuse Yoon of manipulating the investigation into a marine’s drowning in 2023 and receiving free opinion surveys from an election broker in return for a political favor. |
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Supreme Court meets to weigh Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions
Court News |
2025/11/27 06:31
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The Supreme Court is meeting in private Friday with a key issue on its agenda — President Donald Trump ’s birthright citizenship order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices could say as soon as Monday whether they will hear Trump’s appeal of lower court rulings that have uniformly struck down the citizenship restrictions. They have not taken effect anywhere in the United States.
If the court steps in now, the case would be argued in the spring, with a definitive ruling expected by early summer.
The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term in the White House, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown. Other actions include immigration enforcement surges in several cities and the first peacetime invocation of the 18th century Alien Enemies Act.
The administration is facing multiple court challenges, and the high court has sent mixed signals in emergency orders it has issued. The justices effectively stopped the use of the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without court hearings, while they allowed the resumption of sweeping immigration stops in the Los Angeles area after a lower court blocked the practice of stopping people solely based on their race, language, job or location.
The justices also are weighing the administration’s emergency appeal to be allowed to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area for immigration enforcement actions. A lower court has indefinitely prevented the deployment.
Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. Trump’s order would upend more than 125 years of understanding that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.
In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as unconstitutional, or likely so, even after a Supreme Court ruling in late June that limited judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.
While the Supreme Court curbed the use of nationwide injunctions, it did not rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The justices did not decide at that time whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.
But every lower court that has looked at the issue has concluded that Trump’s order violates or most likely violates the 14th Amendment, which was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
The administration is appealing two cases.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled in July that a group of states that sued over the order needed a nationwide injunction to prevent the problems that would be caused by birthright citizenship being in effect in some states and not others.
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Judge orders Trump administration to end National Guard deployment in DC
Court News |
2025/11/23 06:35
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A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to end its monthslong deployment of National Guard troops to help police the nation’s capital.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded that President Donald Trump’s military takeover in Washington, D.C., illegally intrudes on local officials’ authority to direct law enforcement in the district. She put her order on hold for 21 days to allow for an appeal, however.
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued to challenge the Guard deployments. He asked the judge to bar the White House from deploying Guard troops without the mayor’s consent while the lawsuit plays out.
Dozens of states took sides in Schwalb’s lawsuit, with their support falling along party lines.
Cobb found that while the president does have authority to protect federal functioning and property, he can’t unilaterally deploy the D.C. National Guard to help with crime control as he sees fit or call in troops from other states.
After her ruling, Schwalb called for troops to be sent home. “Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the President can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants — with no check on his military power,” Schwalb said.
The White House, though, stood by the deployment.
“President Trump is well within his lawful authority to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement with specific tasks,” said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. “This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC.”
In August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington. Within a month, more than 2,300 National Guard troops from eight states and the district were patrolling the city under the command of the Secretary of the Army. Trump also deployed hundreds of federal agents to assist in patrols.
The administration has also deployed Guard troops to Los Angeles and tried to send troops into Chicago and Portland, Oregon, prompting other court challenges. A federal appeals court allowed the Los Angeles deployment, and the administration is appealing a judge’s decision in Portland that found the president did not have the authority to call up or deploy National Guard troops there.
The Supreme Court is weighing the administration’s emergency appeal to be allowed to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area in support of an immigration crackdown. A lower court has indefinitely prevented the deployment.
In Washington, It’s unclear how long the deployments will last, but attorneys from Schwalb’s office said Guard troops are likely to remain in the city through at least next summer.
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Man pleads not guilty to sparking deadly Palisades Fire in Los Angeles
Court News |
2025/10/25 16:12
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A 29-year-old man accused of sparking the deadly Palisades Fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history, pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal charges.
Jonathan Rinderknecht appeared in federal court Thursday afternoon after arriving in Los Angeles from Florida earlier in the day, his attorney Steve Haney said. A judge ordered that he remain in custody ahead of his trial.
Federal officials said Rinderknecht, who lived in the area, started a small fire on New Year’s Day that smoldered underground before reigniting nearly a week later and roaring through Pacific Palisades, home to many of Los Angeles’ rich and famous.
The fire, which left 12 dead in the hillside neighborhoods across Pacific Palisades and Malibu, was one of two blazes that broke out on Jan. 7, killing more than 30 people in all and destroying over 17,000 homes and buildings while burning for days in Los Angeles County.
Haney told the judge he took issue with the fact that Rinderknecht was facing charges for the Palisades Fire when he allegedly started the smaller fire beforehand known as the Lachman Fire.
“My client is being charged with a fire that started seven days after,” he said.
Rinderknecht was staying at his sister’s house in Orlando when he was arrested by federal officials on Oct. 7. He made his first court appearance the next day in Florida on a charge of malicious destruction by means of a fire.
A week later, a grand jury indicted him on additional charges including one count of arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and one count of timber set afire. If convicted, he would face up to 20 years in federal prison.
Rinderknecht’s trial is set for December 16.
On Thursday, he appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Rozella Oliver wearing a white jumpsuit. His attorney argued that he should be released on bail, based on the evaluation of court officials in Florida.
Rinderknecht has no documented history of mental health issues, drug use, or prior criminal activity, Haney said.
However, the judge in Florida who ordered Rinderknecht to be detained said he had concerns about the Rinderknecht’s mental health and his ability to get to California for future court hearings.
He appeared agitated when the judge in Los Anglees again ordered that he remain in jail, interjecting into the microphone, “Can I actually say something about detainment?”
Haney said they planned to return to the judge with additional evidence for why Rinderknecht should be released on bail.
“He’s a frustrated young man,” Haney said after the hearing. “He doesn’t know why he’s in jail right now.”
Haney said they plan to argue that even if Rinderknecht was the cause of the initial smaller fire on New Year’s Day, there were several “intervening factors” in the week between that day and when the Palisades Fire ignited, mainly the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Rinderknecht made several 911 calls to report the fire, according to a criminal complaint. Federal officials called the Palisades blaze a “holdover fire” from the Jan. 1 fire, which was not fully extinguished by firefighters, the complaint said.
The city’s interim fire chief said such fires linger in root systems and can reach depths of 15 to 20 feet (4.6 to over 6 meters), making them undetectable by thermal imaging cameras.
“They had a duty to put the fire out,” Haney said. “I do think he’s a scapegoat.”
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