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Just ahead of its blowout first-quarter earnings report on April 25, Google laid off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams, in a reorganization that will include moving some roles to India and Mexico, CNBC has learned.

The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and for protecting users’ online safety, according to Google’s website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles.

At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has shown off a CGI video of its vision of a lunar base, a vastly ambitious plan the country is hoping to realize in a matter of decades.

The showy — albeit dated-looking — render shows plans for the International Lunar Research Station, a Chinese and Russian endeavor that was first announced in 2021.

The video is also raising eyebrows for a bizarre cameo: a NASA Space Shuttle taking off from a launch pad in the distance, as spotted by Space.com.

It's either some next-level humor from the Chinese space program or a hilarious oversight, since the Shuttle has been retired for more than a decade — not to mention that China and NASA aren't even allowed to talk to each other, nevermind collaborate.

Police say that the incident appears to be a “tragic accident.”

A 2-year-old boy was killed and another child was injured when a strong gust of wind sent a bounce house they were playing in flying into the neighboring lot, according to police.

Authorities from the Pinal County Sheriff officials say they were called at approximately 5 p.m. on Saturday to a residence on W. Rosemead Drive and N. Bel Air Road outside of Casa Grande, Arizona, according to the police statement detailing the incident.

“That afternoon, several children were playing in a bounce house when a strong gust of wind sent it airborne into the neighboring lot,” Pinal County Sheriff’s Office said. “A two-year-old child was transported to the hospital where he passed away. A second child received non-life threatening injuries and was also transported to the hospital for care.”

The boy, who currently remains unnamed, was transported to a local hospital where he died while the other child was found to have non-life-threatening injuries.

DONG NAI, Vietnam: Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in a reservoir in southern Vietnam's Dong Nai province, with locals and media reports suggesting a brutal heatwave and the lake's management are to blame.

Like much of Southeast Asia – where schools have recently been forced to close early and electricity usage has surged – southern and central Vietnam have been scorched by devastating heat.

"All the fish in the Song May reservoir died for lack of water," a local resident in Trang Bom district, who identified himself only as Nghia, told AFP.

"Our life has been turned upside down over the past 10 days because of the smell."

Pictures show residents wading and boating through the 300ha Song May reservoir, with the water barely visible under a blanket of dead marine life.

According to media reports, the area has seen no rain for weeks and the water in the reservoir is too low for the creatures to survive.

A man accused of kicking a bison in the leg at Yellowstone National Park while under the influence of alcohol was injured by the animal and later arrested, park officials said Monday.

Clarence Yoder of Idaho Falls, Idaho, approached the bison “too closely (within 25 yards)” on the afternoon of Sunday, April 21, on a road about seven miles east of the park’s West Entrance, according to a National Park Service news release.

The release said that park rangers went to the area after getting “a report of an individual who harassed a herd of bison and kicked a bison in the leg. They located the suspect’s vehicle near the West Entrance and stopped it in the town of West Yellowstone, Montana.”

Rangers took the 40-year-old Yoder to a nearby medical facility where he was “evaluated, treated and released from medical care,” the release said. He then was taken to the Gallatin County Detention Center in Bozeman, Montana.

The park did not have further details on the encounter or the nature of Yoder’s injury.

Hours of violence that unfolded overnight at a pro-Palestinian encampment set up on UCLA’s campus has prompted concern about authorities’ response and left questions about the future of the student protest in the coming days.

In a letter to the University of California Board of Regents obtained by The Times, UC President Michael V. Drake wrote that there is “sufficient confusion” surrounding the violence and that he was ordering an independent review of the university’s planning, its actions and the response by law enforcement.

“I believe such a review can address many of my immediate questions but also help guide us for possible future events,” he wrote.

In the wake of Wednesday’s violence, officials have not said whether they plan to remove the encampment, which was erected last week in a demand for divestment from Israel and an end to the country’s military actions in Gaza. Just before midnight, a large group of counterdemonstrators, wearing black outfits and white masks, arrived on campus and tried to tear down the barricades surrounding the encampment.

"Tens of millions" of people are using technical workarounds to secretly access WhatsApp in countries where it is banned, the messaging platform's boss has said.

“You’d be surprised how many people have figured it out,” Will Cathcart told BBC News.

Like many Western apps, WhatsApp is banned in Iran, North Korea and Syria.

And last month, China joined the list of those banning users from accessing the secure platform.

Other countries, including Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, restrict features such as voice calls.

But WhatsApp can see where its users truly are, thanks to their registered phone numbers.

“We have a lot of anecdotal reports of people using WhatsApp and what we can do is look at some of the countries where we're seeing blocking and still see tens of millions of people connecting to WhatsApp," Mr Cathcart told BBC News.

Electric-car maker’s public policy unit also being disbanded as chief announces in memo hundreds more jobs to be cut

Elon Musk has shut down the division that runs Tesla’s Supercharger business, dismissed two senior executives and fired hundreds more staff as the electric-car maker continues its restructuring amid a sharp downturn in the EV market.

Musk announced internally on Monday that the head of the superchargers group, Rebecca Tinucci, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, would be leaving along with their entire teams. About 500 people were in the supercharger group, the memo said.

Tesla’s supercharger system is among the largest charging networks in the world, and was one the reasons the company enjoyed such a commanding lead over rival carmakers for so long. While the supercharger operations will continue, the move raises questions over the future of the charging business.

The entire public policy unit will also be disbanded following the departure of its leader, Rohan Patel, in the middle of April.

Just last month, the retail giant announced plans to expand the initiative.

Walmart will close all 51 of its doctor-staffed health clinics as part of an announcement that its Walmart Health initiative is shutting down.

The clinics, in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Texas, had been open just a few years. Walmart also said Tuesday it is winding down its virtual care option.

Walmart pharmacies and vision centers will not be affected.

Patients with scheduled appointments will continue to be seen, and Walmart will make efforts to direct patients to high-quality providers in their insurance networks to ensure they continue to get care, CNBC reported.

Children should not be allowed to use smartphones until they are 13 and should be banned from accessing conventional social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat until they are 18, according to a report by experts commissioned by Emmanuel Macron.

The French president had asked scientists and experts to suggest screen use guidelines for children with a view to France taking unprecedented steps on limiting their exposure. It was unclear how the government might now proceed after the report’s publication. Macron said in January: “There might be bans, there might be restrictions.”

The hard-hitting report said children needed to be protected from the tech industry’s profit-driven “strategy of capturing children’s attention, using all forms of cognitive bias to shut children away on their screens, control them, re-engage them and monetise them”.

Children were becoming “merchandise” in this new tech market, the report said, adding: “We want [the industry] to know we’ve seen what they’re doing and we won’t let them get away with it.”


If I had a child in the future, I will be damn sure not to hand a smartphone to them until they are grown up.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will take a historic step toward easing federal restrictions on cannabis, with plans to announce an interim rule soon reclassifying the drug for the first time since the Controlled Substances Act was enacted more than 50 years ago, four sources with knowledge of the decision tell NBC News.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to approve an opinion by the Department of Health and Human Services that marijuana should be reclassified from the most strict Schedule I to the less stringent Schedule III, marking the first time that the U.S. government would acknowledge its potential medical benefits and begin studying them in earnest.

Attorney General Merrick Garland will submit the rescheduling proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget as early as Tuesday afternoon, a source familiar with the timeline told NBC News.

The Justice Department "continues to work on this rule," a Biden administration official said. "We have no further comment at this time."

Estuaries – the place where a river meets the ocean – are often called the “nurseries of the sea”. They are home to many of the fish we eat and support vast numbers of birds, while the surrounding salt marsh helps to stabilise shorelines and absorb floods.

However, a new study shows that nearly half of the world’s estuaries have been altered by humans, and 20% of this estuary loss has occurred in the past 35 years.

Using satellite data, researchers measured the changes that had occurred at 2,396 estuaries between 1984 and 2019. The results, published in the journal Earth’s Future, found that over the past 35 years more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of estuary have been converted into urban or agricultural land, with the majority of the loss (90%) having occurred in rapidly developing Asian countries.

By contrast, very little estuary loss has occurred in high-income countries during the past 35 years – mostly because extensive estuary alteration happened many decades before, during those countries’ own phase of rapid development.

Many high-income countries are now recognising and undoing the damage, with locations such as the Tees estuary in northern England investing in returning the area to mudflats and salt marsh to help reduce flood risk, increase resilience to the climate crisis, replenish fish populations, and let nature recover.

Williams-Sonoma could be paying a hefty fine for claiming a small chunk of its products were "Made in USA" when they weren't.

In a federal court filing on Monday, the Federal Trade Commission asked a judge to sign an order that would fine the luxury home goods company $3.18 million for violating a 2020 order regarding the same false label claims. Williams-Sonoma settled those charges and was required to pay $1 million to the FTC, and the following year, it submitted a report describing how it had complied with every provision in the order.

However, the FTC's new claims state the company has violated the order with multiple deceptive U.S.-origin claims in the years since — including on three products in July 2021, when it filed the compliance order.

One such claim, which the FTC says Williams-Sonoma made between April 2022 and August 2023, involved certain PBTeen mattress pads that were advertised as "crafted in America from domestic and imported materials." The federal body said in numerous instances, those products were actually "wholly imported" from China.

DETROIT — In the not-too-distant future, automatic emergency braking will have to come standard on all new passenger vehicles in the United States, a requirement that the government says will save hundreds of lives and prevent thousands of injuries every year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled the final version of the new regulation on Monday and called it the most significant safety rule in the past two decades. It's designed to prevent many rear-end and pedestrian collisions and reduce the roughly 40,000 traffic deaths that happen each year.

"We're living through a crisis in roadway deaths," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview. "So we need to do something about it."

It's the U.S. government's first attempt to regulate automated driving functions and is likely to help curb some of the problems that have surfaced with driver-assist and fully automated driving systems.

WASHINGTON -- Makers of medical tests that have long escaped government oversight will have about four years to show that their new offerings deliver accurate results, under a government rule vigorously opposed by the testing industry.

The regulation finalized Monday by the Food and Drug Administration will gradually phase in oversight of new tests developed by laboratories, a multibillion-dollar industry that regulators say poses growing risks to Americans. The goal is to ensure that new tests for cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, genetic conditions and many other illnesses are safe, accurate and reliable.

“The agency cannot stand by while Americans continue to rely on results from these tests without assurance that they work,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told reporters on a conference call.

Califf said inaccurate tests can lead to unnecessary treatment or delays in getting proper care.

On March 16, cows on a Texas dairy farm began showing symptoms of a mysterious illness now known to be H5N1 bird flu. Their symptoms were nondescript, but their milk production dramatically dropped and turned thick and creamy yellow. The next day, cats on the farm that had consumed some of the raw milk from the sick cows also became ill. While the cows would go on to largely recover, the cats weren't so lucky. They developed depressed mental states, stiff body movements, loss of coordination, circling, copious discharge from their eyes and noses, and blindness. By March 20, over half of the farm's 24 or so cats died from the flu.

In a study published today in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers in Iowa, Texas, and Kansas found that the cats had H5N1 not just in their lungs but also in their brains, hearts, and eyes. The findings are similar to those seen in cats that were experimentally infected with H5N1, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). But, on the Texas dairy farm, they present an ominous warning of the potential for transmission of this dangerous and evolving virus.

The contaminated milk was the most likely source of the cat's fatal infections, the study authors concluded. Although it can't be entirely ruled out that the cats got sick from eating infected wild birds, the milk they drank from the sick cows was brimming with virus particles, and genetic data shows almost exact matches between the cows, their milk, and the cats. "Therefore, our findings suggest cross-species mammal-to-mammal transmission of HPAI H5N1 virus and raise new concerns regarding the potential for virus spread within mammal populations," wrote the authors, who are veterinary researchers from Iowa, Texas, and Kansas.

The early outbreak data from the Texas farm suggests the virus is getting better and better at jumping to mammals, and data from elsewhere shows the virus is spreading widely in its newest host. On March 25, the US Department of Agriculture confirmed the presence of H5N1 in a dairy herd in Texas, marking the first time H5N1 had ever been known to cross over to cows. Since then, the USDA has tallied infections in at least 34 herds in nine states: Texas, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho, Ohio, South Dakota, North Carolina, and Colorado.

Parts of Jakarta are subsiding at unprecedented speed. The longshot fix rests with noodle billionaire Anthoni Salim.

Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea.

Cue Anthoni Salim, the billionaire owner of PT Air Bersih Jakarta, the firm tapped by the government to expand piped water access to the city’s 11 million residents immediately, if not sooner. As of now, one in three Jakartans doesn’t have access to piped water, relying instead on the thousands of illegal wells that dot the city — and deplete the aquifers and weaken the ground, creating prime conditions for further sinking.

If Salim’s ABJ can help deliver on the plan to bring water to every Jakarta household, experts say the city has a chance — and the company will rake in billions of dollars. If it fails, it’s likely that chaos will reign in the world’s second-biggest metropolis. Unabated sinking, combined with intensifying storms and rising sea levels, will be more than Jakarta’s seawalls can withstand, said JanJaap Brinkman, a flood expert at Dutch water research institute Deltares: “There will be so much sea water rushing in, it will never stop. There will be no escape.”

For Salim, who didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story, it’s been a long time coming. He’s amassed more than $10 billion through a handful of industries, including one of the world’s biggest instant-noodle makers, but controlling the capital’s water supply has been a personal priority since a revolution almost dismantled his family’s conglomerate 25 years ago. When the government sought bids to revamp the city’s water infrastructure, Salim’s was one of two companies to raise its hand.

Tesla gaining approval to use FSD in China makes its vehicles more attractive and unlocks another revenue stream for the company.

Tesla (TSLA) stock soared on Monday following reports that CEO Elon Musk won Chinese approval to deploy the automaker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) autonomous software on the mainland.

As was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, people familiar with the matter said that officials told Tesla that they had tentatively approved FSD in the country during Musk’s 24-hour visit to Beijing over the weekend.

Separately, Bloomberg earlier reported that Tesla will use Chinese tech company Baidu’s street-level mapping data to power FSD. Tesla had been previously using Baidu’s mapping data for satellite navigation in its cars. Working with a Chinese company helped with regulatory approval as data privacy and security risks are minimized, the reports said.

Tesla closed up 15.3%, hitting its highest levels since March 1. Tesla stock is now up over 30% in the past four trading sessions.

When three-year-old Saylor Class began complaining of monsters in her bedroom, her parents thought it was just a figment of a child's overactive imagination.

But then a beekeeper discovered tens of thousands of honeybees above the girl's bedroom.

Saylor had complained of "monsters in the wall" of her room at their farmhouse in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her mother, Ashley Massis Class, and her husband thought nothing of it.

They had after all just shown their daughter the Pixar movie, Monsters, Inc.

"We even gave her a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night," said Ms Massis Class, a home designer.

A company alleged to have fraudulently sold a face mask as N95-grade must refund more than $1.1 million to customers nationwide, the Federal Trade Commission announced Monday.

Razer and its affiliates advertised the Zephyr mask as N95-grade despite never submitting it for testing or certification by the Food and Drug Administration or National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency said. In ads and posts on social media, the Zephyr masks were touted as the equivalent of an N95 that would protect users from COVID, the FTC stated in a complaint.

"These businesses falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator," Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. "The FTC will continue to hold accountable businesses that use false and unsubstantiated claims to target consumers who are making decisions about their health and safety."