The death toll stands at 35 and is expected to rise.

Laid-off employee

Getty images/ skaman306

• On an average, at least 1,600 tech sector workers have been laid off every day of 2023 so far, per Layoffs.fyi.
• That’s as 91 tech companies globally have axed 24,151 jobs, just 15 days into 2023.
• 1,023 tech companies laid off 154,256 workers in 2022, per data aggregated by Layoffs.fyi.

Layoffs in the tech sector show no signs of abating — on an average, about 1,600 workers have gotten the pink slip every day in 2023 so far, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi.

That’s as 91 tech companies globally have already laid off 24,151 workers just 15 days into 2023, according to data aggregated by Layoffs.ai. This is already about 15% of the 154,256 workers who were laid off by over a thousand tech companies in 2022.

Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce top Layoffs.fyi’s list with about 18,000, 11,000, and 8,000 staffers laid-off, respectively, between November 2022 and January 2023.

The layoffs at Amazon primarily affected those in corporate roles, including those in the company’s Devices and Books businesses and human resource department, Insider’s Samantha Delouya reported on January 5. Meta cut positions across the company, including its Reality Labs division overseeing metaverse initiatives, while Salesforce’s headcount reduction hit the Slack and MuleSoft business units.

The rash of layoffs — which started last year — came after tech companies hired and expanded aggressively during the pandemic. But they started conducting widespread layoffs in late 2022, as earnings weakened across the board amid fears of an impending recession. This also spilled over into 2023. 

Amazon and Salesforce announced in the first week of the year they were collectively cutting over 25,000 jobs. Other tech companies that have slashed headcount include media company Vimeo and supply chain software firm Flexport.

And it’s not just the tech sector that’s laying off staff either.

Last week, banking giant Goldman Sachs started laying off 3,000 employees globally as dealmaking slows. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, is also slashing up to 500 roles for the first time in four years.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, attempted to explain his company’s rationale for the downsizing in his memo to staff, saying: “as our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

George Santos (left) and Adam Kinzinger.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger is trying to get Rep. George Santos to resign.
• Santos told Rep. Matt Gaetz he will resign if 142,000 people demand it.
• “He said he’ll resign if enough people ask – so game on. Sign the petition!” Kinzinger tweeted. 

Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger has started a petition to get embattled New York Rep. George Santos to resign. 

Kinzinger kicked off an online petition on Thursday, the same day Santos appeared on the podcast “War Room: Pandemic” with Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. During the podcast, Santos said he will resign if more than 142,000 people — the number of people who voted to elect him during the November midterms — call for him to step down. 

“On January 12, 2023, disgraced pathological liar and brand new Congressman George Santos promised Matt Gaetz (and the rest of us) that he would resign if 142,000 people signed a petition asking him to do so — the same number of votes he received in November,” the petition on Kinzinger’s Country First website read. “We’re happy to deliver them to his office!” 

Kinzinger also promoted the petition in a tweet on January 12, writing: “He said he’ll resign if enough people ask – so game on. Sign the petition!” At press time, the petition had garnered 40,311 signatures, less than a third of its goal of 142,000 signatures. 

The petition asks for each person’s first and last name, and their postal code. It’s unclear if Kinzinger is tracking whether the signatures are from people who live in Santos’ district.

The petition appears to be the latest salvo in an online feud between Santos and Kinzinger. On January 11, the two exchanged a series of insults on Twitter. Santos mocked Kinzinger for appearing to fight back tears during a July congressional hearing on the Capitol riot. In response, Kinzinger tweeted: “Cries are better than lies, FRAUD.” 

The scandal-plagued Santos has admitted to making up facts about his work experience and education. In December, Santos said he lied about working at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Santos also told the New York Post in December that he did not graduate from any institute of higher learning.

The admissions came after The New York Times found that companies Santos claimed to have worked for had no record of him. Various other points of doubt have since been raised about Santos’ life and personal history — including his false claim about being Jewish, which he has since walked back, and even his name.

Prosecutors in Long Island said on December 28 that they have opened an investigation into Santos. Long Island Republicans and the New York State GOP in January also called on Santos to resign, but Santos has refused to do so.

As for Kinzinger, the Illinois congressman announced in late 2021 that he would not seek re-election during the midterms. Kinzinger is now a political commentator on CNN. He also leads Country First, an organization “dedicated to defeating the Toxic Tribalism tearing our families, friendships, and country apart.” 

Representatives for Kinzinger and Santos did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. 

Russia wants to besmirch Ukraine’s military in the eyes of onlookers and is planning a fabricated Red Cross report to do it.

Russia – Ukraine war from Michael Novakhov on Inoreader inoreader.com/stream/user/10… news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/art…

Passengers laden with luggage flocked to rail stations in China’s megacities on Monday, heading to their hometowns for holidays that health experts fear could intensify a raging COVID-19 outbreak in areas less-equipped to handle it.

“I haven’t been home for over three years,” a 23-year old Beijing resident surnamed Chen told Reuters as he waited to board a train at the capital’s main rail station.

“I am sure I will be very emotional once I reach the doorstep of my home.”

Having adopted a rigid system of lockdowns and movement controls after the virus first emerged in late 2019, China abruptly abandoned its “zero COVID” policy in early December, letting the virus run unchecked in a population of 1.4 billion people.

Authorities said on Saturday nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospitals between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12, a huge increase from previous figures that had been criticised by the World Health Organisation for not reflecting the scale and severity of the outbreak.

Even those numbers most likely exclude many people dying at home, especially in rural areas with weaker medical systems, one health expert has said. Several experts forecast more than one million people in China will die from the disease this year.

Ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays, also known as the Spring Festival, which officially starts on Jan. 21, state media has been filled with stories of rural hospitals and clinics bolstering their supplies of drugs and equipment.

“The peak of COVID infection in our village has passed, but the Spring Festival is approaching and there are still left-behind villagers, especially the elderly, at risk of secondary infection,” a doctor in Shaanxi province said in an article by regional news outlet Red Star News.

“If the anti-viral and other drugs were more abundant, I would be more confident,” the doctor added.

As well as fever drugs and oxygen supplies, China’s National Health Commission has said it would equip every village clinic with pulse oximeters, fingertip devices commonly used during the pandemic to quickly check oxygen levels.

Beijing’s main railway station has been packed with passengers leaving the capital in recent days, according to Reuters witnesses.

Ma, a 50-year-old labourer, said he felt there was little to worry about as he waited to board a train.

“There are many people who got COVID, but I have not been infected. It’s quite good, I feel quite lucky,” he told Reuters.

In China’s most populous city, Shanghai, temporary night trains have been added to meet demand for travellers heading to the eastern Anhui province, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Meanwhile, arrivals in the gambling hub of Macau exceeded 55,000 on Saturday, the highest daily figure since the pandemic began.

In Hong Kong, the government has said it would increase the number of people who can pass through designated land border control points to the mainland to 65,000 per day from 50,000 between Jan. 18 and Jan. 21.

More than 2 billion trips across China are expected in the weeks around the holidays, its transport ministry has estimated.

The revival of travel in China has lifted expectations of a rebound in the world’s second-largest economy, which is suffering its lowest growth rates in nearly half a century.

Those hopes helped lift Asian equity markets (.MIAPJ0000PUS) 0.9% on Monday, adding to gains of 4.2% last week.

China’s blue-chip index (.CSI300) was up 2% while the yuan reached its highest since July. Global oil prices have also been supported on expectations of a recovery in demand from the world’s top importer China.

The first in a slew of economic data due this week showed China’s new home prices fell again in December as COVID-19 outbreaks hurt demand.

Other data on economic growth, retail sales and industrial output later in the week are certain to be dismal, but markets will likely look past that to how China’s reopening could bolster global growth, analysts say.

“Our baseline scenario assumes nationwide infections will peak in late January,” JP Morgan analysts said in a note on Monday.

The infection peak will catalyse a “sustainable” economic recovery from March onwards, with double-digit growth expected in the second quarter of the year, the analysts said.

China’s full-year growth is likely to rebound to 4.9% in 2023, before steadying in 2024, a Reuters poll showed.

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Russia and Belarus will begin joint air force drills on Monday, which have triggered fears in Kyiv and the West that Moscow could use its ally to launch a new ground offensive in Ukraine.

Minsk says the drills are defensive, and since Moscow used its neighbour as a springboard for its invasion of Ukraine last February Belarus has conducted numerous military exercises, both on its own and jointly with Russia.

Together with Moscow, Minsk has also been bolstering the drills with weaponry and military equipment.

Unofficial Telegram military monitoring channels have been reporting a series of fighters, helicopters and military transport planes coming to Belarus since the start of the year – eight fighters and four cargo planes on Sunday alone.

Reuters was not able to verify the reports. The Belarusian defence ministry said only that “units” of Russia’s air forces have been arriving in Belarus.

“During the tactical flight exercise, all airfields and training grounds of the Air Force and Air Defence Forces of the Armed Forces of Belarus will be involved,” the ministry said in a statement.

The situation on Belarus’s southern border – the border with Ukraine – was “not very calm,” and Ukraine has been “provoking” Belarus, said Pavel Muraveyko, first deputy state secretary of Belarusian Security Council, according to a post on the Belarusian defence ministry’s Telegram app on Sunday.

“We’re maintaining restraint and patience, keeping our gunpowder dry,” Muraveyko said. “We have the necessary set of forces and means that will respond to any manifestations of aggression or a terrorist threat on our territory.”

Ukraine has continuously warned of possible attacks from Belarus and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week that the country must be ready at its border with Belarus.

The Kremlin has denied that it has been pressuring Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to take a more active role in the conflict in Ukraine. Minsk has said it will not enter the war.

Ukraine saw little hope of pulling any more survivors from the rubble of an apartment block in the city of Dnipro on Sunday, a day after the building was hit during a major Russian missile attack, with dozens of people expected to have died.

The regional governor’s adviser, Natalia Babachenko, said 30 people were confirmed dead so far and more than 30 were in hospital, including 12 in a serious condition. Between 30 to 40 people could still be trapped under debris, she said.

Emergency workers said they had heard people screaming for help from underneath piles of debris from the nine-storey apartment block in the east-central city and were using moments of silence to help direct their efforts. Freezing temperatures added to rescuers’ concerns.

“The chances of saving people now are minimal,” Dnipro’s Mayor Borys Filatov told Reuters. I think the number of dead will be in the dozens.”

Ukraine’s Air Force said the apartment block was struck by a Russian Kh-22 missile, which is known to be inaccurate and that Ukraine lacks the air defences to shoot down. The Soviet-era missile was developed during the Cold War to destroy warships.

Russia fired two waves of missiles at Ukraine on Saturday, striking targets across the country as fighting raged on the battlefield in the eastern towns of Soledar and Bakhmut.

Moscow, which invaded last February, has been pounding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones since October, causing sweeping blackouts and disruptions to central heating and running water.

In his nightly address after the Dnipro strike, Zelenskiy called on Western allies to supply more weapons to end “Russian terror” and attacks on civilian targets.

Western powers are considering sending battle tanks to Kyiv and ahead of a meeting of Ukraine’s allies in Ramstein in Germany next Friday, where governments will announce their latest pledges of military support.

On Saturday, Britain followed France and Poland with promises of further weapons, saying it would send 14 of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks as well as other advanced artillery support in the coming weeks.

The first despatch of Western-made tanks to Ukraine is likely to be viewed by Moscow as escalation of the conflict. The Russian Embassy in London said the tanks would drag out the confrontation.

Russia’s invasion, which Moscow calls a “special military operation”, has already killed thousands, displaced millions and turned many cities into rubble.

In Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – the focal point of Russia’s drive to capture more territory – Ukraine’s forces were battling around the small salt-mining town of Soledar.

Russian forces claimed to have taken control of the town, but Ukraine insisted on Sunday that its forces were battling to hold the town, with street fighting raging and Russian forces advancing from various directions.

“Put simply, THE BATTLE CONTINUES,” Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app. “Everything else is unverified information.”

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said it was highly unlikely that Ukrainian forces still held positions within Soledar itself.

Reuters could not immediately verify the situation in the town.

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PALERMO, Italy (Reuters) -Italian police said on Monday they had arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the country’s most wanted mafia boss who had been on the run for three decades, swooping on a private hospital in the Sicilian capital Palermo where he had gone for treatment.

Prosecutors say Messina Denaro is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia.

He has been sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He also faces a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 people the following year.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a great victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the mafia”.

Police said in September 2022 that Messina Denaro was still able to issue commands relating to the way the mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, his regional stronghold, despite his long disappearance.

Messina Denaro, who comes from the small town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.

In 1993 he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

The nearly 60,000 Covid-related deaths China reported for the first five weeks of its current outbreak, the largest the world has ever seen, may underestimate the true toll by hundreds of thousands of fatalities, experts said.

China’s abrupt pivot from Covid Zero in early December unleashed a surge of omicron infections and led to 59,938 virus-related deaths in the nation’s hospitals through Jan. 12, the National Health Commission disclosed this weekend.

Read More: China’s Stunning U-Turn on Zero-COVID Goes From Suffocating Control to Callous Inaction

While the number swamps the few dozen deaths previously recorded in the official tally — which drew widespread criticism both at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization — experts say it’s still likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a Covid Zero strategy.

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“This reported number of Covid-19 deaths might be the tip of the iceberg,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles.

While the figure is roughly in line with what Zhang estimated might be coming from the country’s hospitals, he said it’s only a fraction of the total Covid deaths across the country.

Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64% of the population was infected by mid-January, he estimated 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks based on a conservative 0.1% case fatality rate. That means the official hospital death count is less than 7% of the total mortality seen during the outbreak.

The official toll translates to 1.17 deaths daily for every million people in the country over the course of five weeks, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That’s well below the average daily mortality rate seen in other countries that initially pursued Covid Zero or managed to contain the virus after relaxing their pandemic rules.

When omicron hit South Korea, daily deaths quickly climbed to nearly seven for every 1 million people. Australia and New Zealand saw mortality nearing or topping four per million a day during their first winters with omicron. Even Singapore, which had a well-planned and gradual shift away from its zero tolerance approach, had deaths peak at about two per million people daily.

“These figures would suggest that China is having a very mild wave, with very few deaths per case,” Louise Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at the London-based predictive health analytics firm Airfinity, said in an email. “It would be the lowest of any country/region abandoning a zero Covid policy.”

It could be that many of the country’s deaths occurred in nursing care facilities or at home, explaining some of the undercount, she said, as China’s latest disclosure only counted hospital deaths. Reports of overwhelmed crematoriums around the country suggest excess mortality is at a high level.

Read More: Satellite Images Seem to Show China’s High COVID Death Toll

The group currently estimates China’s total Covid-related death count is about 390,000, with a potential range of 77,000 to 945,000 based on fatalities seen in other countries, she said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the new numbers from China, saying they allow for a better understanding of the situation and the potential impact of the Covid wave in China. He also asked the country to continue sharing such information and provide a more detailed breakdown of data by province over time.

New Definition

China narrowed the definition of Covid mortality after it dismantled its zero tolerance approach, with health authorities asking hospitals to limit Covid deaths to those who died from respiratory failure after contracting the virus.

That led to a dearth of deaths reported throughout December and early January. Of the 60,000 Covid deaths disclosed over the weekend, a little more than 9% succumbed to respiratory failure, the NHC said. The rest died of underlying diseases following a Covid infection, the agency said.

The number of deaths is expected to increase as the virus continues its relentless trek across the country, since mortality tends to lag infections by a few weeks, officials said. The Lunar New Year Holiday, which starts Jan. 21 and involves millions of people traveling to their hometowns, could increase its spread, said Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation and chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington.

The group’s modeling efforts forecast 1.2 million to 1.6 million deaths in China by the end of 2023, depending on what mitigation measures the country puts in place, Mokdad said.

China is capable of accurately tracking Covid mortality despite the size of its current outbreak, UCLA’s Zhang said, thanks to data from its public security, civil administration and hospital systems.

“More detailed information and transparent data on China’s coronavirus situation need to be shared with the World Health Organization, other countries and China’s own people,” he said.