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Amazon has confirmed that its letting go of 16,000 workers and employees across its organization. In an announcement by company SVP Beth Galetti, she explained that Amazon was going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they do not find any. Galetti also said that Amazon doesnt have plans to announce broad reductions every few months but admitted that the company could make adjustments as appropriate.News about the layoffs was leaked in an email mistakenly sent out early to workers, along with a calendar invitation for a meeting dubbed internally as Project Dawn. In the email seen by Bloomberg and the BBC, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey told workers that their impacted colleagues from the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been notified. Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success, Aubrey reportedly wrote in the email. Amazon eliminated 14,000 roles back in October 2025 across its games, logistics, payment and cloud computing divisions, with the availability of AI technologies being one of the main reasons for the layoffs. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before, Amazon said in its announcement back then. This new round of layoffs is just a continuation of the previous one, as Amazon was reportedly looking to let 30,000 people go from the start. The announcement comes shortly after Amazon revealed that it was shutting down its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores and will focus on grocery deliveries instead. To note, Amazons year-over-year net sales grew by 13 percent in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Its net income increased to $21.2 billion compared to the $15.3 billion it posted in the third quarter of 2024. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazons-latest-round-of-layoffs-will-affect-16000-workers-120000702.html?src=rss
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Delhaize is introducing summer cooking camps for children aged 2 to 12, running throughout the 2026 summer holidays.
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Marketing and Advertising
Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having "explicit" conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature. Reuters reported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we "pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision. In its statement to the publication, Meta accused the New Mexico Attorney General of "cherry picking documents to paint a flawed and inaccurate picture." New Mexico is suing Meta on charges that the company failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children; the case is scheduled to go to trial in February. Despite only being available for a brief time, Meta's chatbots have already accumulated quite a history of behavior that veers into offensive if not outright illegal. In April 2025, The Wall Street Journal released an investigation that found Meta's chatbots could engage in fantasy sex conversations with minors, or could be directed to mimic a minor and engage in sexual conversation. The report claimed that Zuckerberg had wanted looser guards implemented around Meta's chatbots, but a spokesperson denied that the company had overlooked protections for children and teens. Internal review documents revealed in August 2025 detailed several hypothetical situations of what chatbot behaviors would be permitted, and the lines between sensual and sexual seemed pretty hazy. The document also permitted the chatbots to argue racist concepts. At the time, a representative told Engadget that the offending passages were hypotheticals rather than actual policy, which doesn't really seem like much of an improvement, and that they were removed from the document. Despite the multiple instances of questionable use of the chatbots, Meta only decided to suspend teen accounts' access to them last week. The company said it is temporarily removing access while it develops the parental controls that Zuckerberg had allegedly rejected using."Parents have long been able to see if their teens have been chatting with AIs on Instagram, and in October we announced our plans to go further, building new tools to give parents more control over their teens experiences with AI characters," a representative from Meta said. "Last week we once again reinforced our commitment to delivering on our promise of parental controls for AI, pausing teen access to AI characters completely until the updated version is ready."New Mexico filed this lawsuit against Meta in December 2023 on claims that the company's platforms failed to protect minors from harassment by adults. Internal documents revealed early on in that complaint revealed that 100,000 child users were harassed daily on Meta's services.Update, January 27, 2025, 6:52PM ET: Added statement from Meta spokesperson.Update, January 27, 2025, 6:15PM ET: Corrected misstated timeline of the New Mexico lawsuit, which was filed in December 2023, not December 2024.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-was-initially-opposed-to-parental-controls-for-ai-chatbots-according-to-legal-filing-230110214.html?src=rss
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