📌 Federal Worker Cuts, Peace Talks, More

Tens of thousands of civil servants were cleared to take a buyout from Donald Trump's administration after a federal judge ruling.

A federal judge ruled that the unprecedented downsizing of federal agencies could proceed. About 75,000 workers have signed up for the buyout, said a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, equal to 3% of the civilian workforce.

Trump's administration has promised to pay their salaries through October without requiring them to work, though unions have warned the offer is not trustworthy.

Unions representing federal workers had sued to stop the program while US District Judge George O'Toole in Boston considered the issue. The judge ruled that the unions did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit and said the issue needed to be tackled in other forums before landing in court.

The buyout is one of many approaches Trump is taking to slash a civilian workforce of 2.3 million that he has blasted as ineffective and biased against him. He has also ordered government agencies to prepare for wide-ranging job cuts, and several have already begun to lay off recent hires who lack full job security.

Trump has deputized billionaire Elon Musk to head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, which is combing through payment and personnel records to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget, which totaled $6.75 trillion last year. Civilian worker salaries account for less than 5% of that total.

Donald Trump has said that he and Vladimir Putin have agreed to begin negotiations to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump said that he was “OK” with Ukraine not having Nato membership and that it was “unlikely” that Ukraine would take much land back in the negotiations. Russia “took a lot of land, and they fought for that land and they lost a lot of soldiers,” he told reporters. Trump said he was not closely concerned with which territories were handed over. “I’m just here to try and get peace. I don’t care so much about anything other than I want to stop having millions of people killed.” In a social media post, Trump said he held a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” with Putin and that they agreed to “have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he and Trump had a “meaningful” conversation by phone. “No one wants peace more than Ukraine. Together with the US, we are charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression and ensure a lasting, reliable peace. As President Trump said, let’s get it done.” Earlier in Brussels, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (pictured) said: “We must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. … Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.” He ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine.

For the second year in a row, the Israel-Hamas war accounted for the majority of journalist deaths.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said 124 journalists were killed worldwide in 2024. This marks the deadliest year on record for media workers since CPJ started keeping track in 1992.

After the 82 journalists killed in Gaza, the countries with the highest deaths were Sudan and Pakistan, with six cases each, and Mexico with five.

The CPJ records a journalist’s killing in its database if it has reasonable grounds to believe they may have been killed concerning their work. The group’s researchers have additional cases where they are working to independently verify if journalism was a factor in the death.

People should care about journalist killings, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said, because “killing a journalist is the most extreme form of censorship. “It’s journalists who are providing the information and seeking out the information that other people wish to conceal from us,” she said.

The Israel-Hamas war has been the deadliest conflict on record for journalists, the CPJ said. As of Tuesday, at least 169 media workers have been killed since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel and the Israeli counteroffensive. Nearly all the journalists were Palestinian.

Private equity firm Kimmeridge typically invests in oil and gas companies but is offsetting that by moving into carbon credits.

Its startup, Chestnut Carbon, buys marginal and degraded farmland, plants them with native trees, and harvests carbon credits. These have become a hot commodity among tech companies looking to offset skyrocketing emissions caused partly by expanding data centers serving cloud and AI firms.

Chestnut owns over 35,000 acres of marginal and degraded farmland and pasture in the southeastern US. The startup hopes to expand its carbon credit capacity to 100 million metric tons by 2030, requiring hundreds of thousands of acres to be transformed back into forests.

Chestnut made a down payment on that target with the sale of 7 million carbon credits to Microsoft. (One carbon credit is worth one metric ton of carbon.)

The 25-year deal will help Chestnut rehabilitate 60,000 acres in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Chestnut’s goal of 100 million metric tons is a fraction of annual carbon emissions, which hit 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023, the International Energy

Agency said. The world can reportedly support 2.2 billion acres more foresty. Once those forests matured, they would hold 205 billion metric tons of carbon — about a quarter of the carbon in the atmosphere.

Tech firms are experiencing another wave of layoffs, but many are still hiring, especially in AI, infrastructure, and cloud computing.

Workday is laying off 1,750 employees but plans to continue hiring in key strategic areas, with 348 job openings available. Meta is cutting 5% of its workforce but plans to backfill roles and hire in priority areas like infrastructure, monetization, Reality Labs, and AI, with 1,750 job openings.

Stripe has laid off 300 workers but aims to increase its head count to 10,000 by the end of 2025, with several hundred job openings. Salesforce is laying off 1,000 employees, but CEO Marc Benioff said it plans to hire 2,000 salespeople to sell its AI products. At press time, the company had 995 job openings.

Microsoft has made performance-based layoffs and cuts across organizations but has 2,128 job openings. Amazon and Google are expected to make layoffs but plan to grow head count in key areas like AI and cloud, with significant expenditures in AI.

People can rarely tell the difference between couples therapy from a professional or advice supplied by AI, a study has found.

Researchers asked 830 people, almost a fifth of whom had couples therapy, to look at responses to relationship issues provided by either a therapist or AI. Responses to relationship problems written by ChatGPT were generally rated more highly for including key psychotherapy principles.

They had to identify whether they thought the answer came from the human expert or the AI tool in each case. People correctly said a response had come from a therapist just 56% of the time and correctly guessed the author to have been ChatGPT only 51% of the time.

Relationship problems presented to ChatGPT included a clean and tidy person calling their partner “disgusting” and their partner retorting that they are a “clean freak.” The AI responded to the clean person that “it can be frustrating when it feels like your standards aren't being met, especially in your own home.”

ChatGPT told the other partner: “It sounds like you feel your efforts are being overlooked and that the expectations around cleanliness might feel a bit overwhelming.” The responses generated by ChatGPT were generally longer than those written by the therapists.

The authors of the study, led by Ohio State University and Hatch Data and Mental Health, said: “Mental health experts find themselves in a precarious situation. We must speedily discern the possible destination (for better or worse) of the AI-therapist train as it may have already left the station.”

A seafood company that lost about 27,000 salmon from a fish farm off Norway is offering a bounty of $45 per fugitive fish caught.

Mowi, the world's largest producer of farmed salmon, said about a quarter of its 105,000 salmon escaped from a fish farm in Troms and entered the waters of northwest Norway. The company said the fence separating the farm from open waters was damaged by stormy weather in the area.

The company called on registered fishing professionals in the country to bring any of the fugitive salmon caught to designated "reception centers," where they will be paid the bounty.

Vegard Oen Hatten of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries said companies are normally only allowed to conduct recapture operations within 1,640 feet of their facilities, but Mowi was ordered to expand the range of its search for the missing salmon due to the massive scale of the escape.

Experts said the escaped fish could pose a major risk to wild salmon. They said the escaped salmon compete for the same spawning grounds and could spread infections such as sea lice. Also, studies have found interbreeding between wild and captive salmon leads to offspring with a much lower survival rate.