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The Washington Post informed its team on Wednesday morning that it was starting a round of mass layoffs, according to multiple media reports and a memo seen by Fast Company. Multiple sections are being shut down completely, while others are being shrunk significantly. The papers executive editor, Matt Murray, announced the cuts to the newsroom employees, saying that all sections would be impacted by the layoffs. He said the Post would be making a strategic reset, and is also cutting staff on the business side. The New York Times reported that approximately 30% of the Posts employees are being laid off, including more than 300 of the around 800 journalists. News of the layoffs attracted a harsh rebuke from people in the media, including the Post‘s own former editor, who criticized the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the worlds greatest news organizations, Marty Baron, executive editor of the Post from 2013 to 2021, said in a statement. The Washington Posts ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.” Reached for comment, a Washington Post spokesperson sent the following statement: The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company. These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers. Sports and other sections said to be gutted The sports section will reportedly be eliminated entirely, meaning that Washingtons paper of record will not provide day-to-day coverage for any of the citys professional or college sports teams. Murray noted that some of the sports reporters will be moved to the features department to cover the culture of sports. This comes in the wake of controversy surrounding the Posts plans for the Winter Olympics, which start this week. The Times reported on January 24 that the paper axed its plans to send a delegation to the Italy games just two weeks before the opening ceremony, but quickly reversed that decision, sending a team of four after the report came out. The Olympics arent the only major event looming on the sports calendar, as Super Bowl LX will be played in San Francisco this weekend, NCAA March Madness is just about a month away, and the FIFA World Cup, hosted in North America this year, kicks off in June. Meanwhile, the Post is reportedly cutting down its Metro desk, which covers Washington, D.C., and its surroundings, from over 40 journalists to well below half of that. The Post is drastically reducing its international coverage as well, although some international bureaus will stay operational Additionally, the paper is reportedly closing the books section and ending its daily Post Reports podcast. Weeks of speculation regarding the paper’s future The announcement comes after weeks of speculation within the newsroom. The Washington Post Guild made a statement last week, directly attacking Bezos, whose holding company, Nash Holdings, bought the paper for $250 million in 2013 and has owned it ever since. During Donald Trumps first term as president, the Post adopted the slogan Democracy Dies in Darkness and experienced a period of growth thanks to its aggressive coverage of the administration. In 2023, Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher of the Post, and these layoffs are just the latest in a line of changes made since then. Notably, the paper did not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election for the first time in 36 years. In response to the layoffs, the Washington Post Guild released another statement: These layoffs are not inevitable, its first paragraph reads. A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach and its future. This story has been updated with the Post‘s response to our inquiry.
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Low Earth orbit is already getting crowded. Around 14,500 active satellites are circling Earth, and roughly two-thirds of them are run by SpaceX. Now, in filings connected to Elon Musks plan to fold SpaceX and his AI firm xAI together ahead of an IPO, the company has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch up to one million more. The figure is so large it would dwarf the number of satellites currently in orbit. In fact, it is more than every object ever sent into space by every nation combined. So why is Musk planning it, and what would it mean for the rest of us? In a public update posted on the SpaceX website as part of the merger process between SpaceX and xAI, Musk wrote that Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization. The Kardashev scale is a measure of technological development first outlined in the 1960s by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who died in 2019. While the scale of the proposal may have impressed Kardashev, many experts are far more skeptical. A million new satellites would represent roughly a 67-fold increase over todays orbital population. Proposals on the scale being discussedup to one million satellitesrepresent a step change that deserves the same level of scrutiny we would apply to any other major global infrastructure project,” says Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky International, a nonprofit focused on preserving night skies and mitigating the impacts of light pollution. Satellite deployment at such a scale would have huge knock-on effects. The consequences extend well beyond astronomy, Hartley says. They include cumulative impacts on the night sky, increased atmospheric pollution from satellite launches and re-entries, and a sharply elevated risk of orbital congestion and collision cascades that could impair access to low Earth orbit for all nations. When satellites burn up, they release metals such as aluminum into the upper atmosphere, a process scientists and the U.K. Space Agency warn is still poorly understood but likely accelerating as megaconstellations grow. There is also the question of safety. Space is already crowded with satellites that power communications, enable GPS navigation, and support countless services we rely on every day. Adding vastly more objects increases the chances of close approaches, which, if not monitored and avoided, can result in collisions and cascading debris. SpaceX will say they can do that stationkeeping successfully, but it doesn’t take many failures to have you end up in a bad situation, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space sustainability analyst based in London and Boston and formerly at the Center for Astrophysics. The SpaceX satellites will be in the higher part of low Earth orbit where it will take a long time for failed satellites to re-enter. Hartley, for his part, argues that these risks demand far more scrutiny. Decisions made now will shape the near-Earth environment for generations, he says. Not everyone believes the million-satellite figure is even realistic. As to the question of if its practical, I would think not, says Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. Filing for 1 million satellites is probably a way for SpaceX to push the envelope before accepting whatever fraction regulators deem acceptable. That tactic may already be working. The FCC initially rejected a 2022 SpaceX proposal to launch 30,000 satellites, before later approving it in 25% tranches. The commission authorized another 7,500 satellites this January, for a total approval of 15,000 satellites from that filing, says Henry. SpaceX is also asking the FCC to waive standard deployment milestones, and says the economics of the plan depend on Starship becoming fully reusable, a goal it has not yet reached. In that sense, the million-satellite request is not a signal of imminent growth, but a bid to stake out spectrum and orbital real estate for a future that Musk is already trying to define.
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President Donald Trump’s administration is expected to unveil its grandest plan yet to rebuild supply chains of critical minerals needed for everything from jet engines to smartphones, likely through purchase agreements with partners on top of creating a $12 billion U.S. strategic reserve to help counter China’s dominance.Vice President JD Vance is set to deliver a keynote address Wednesday at a meeting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is hosting with officials from several dozen European, Asian and African nations. The U.S. is expected to sign deals on supply chain logistics, though details have not been revealed. Rubio met Tuesday with foreign ministers from South Korea and India to discuss critical minerals mining and processing.The meeting and expected agreements will come just two days after Trump announced Project Vault, or a stockpile of critical minerals to be funded with a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and nearly $1.67 billion in private capital.Trump’s Republican administration is making such bold moves after China, which controls 70% of the world’s rare earths mining and 90% of the processing, choked off the flow of the elements in response to Trump’s tariff war. The two superpowers are in a one-year truce after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in October and agreed to pull back on high tariffs and stepped-up rare earth restrictions.But China’s limits remain tighter than they were before Trump took office.“We don’t want to ever go through what we went through a year ago,” Trump said on Monday when announcing Project Vault. Countering China’s dominance on critical minerals Other countries might join with the Trump administration in buying up critical minerals and taking other steps to spur industry development because the trade war revealed how vulnerable Western countries are to China, said Pini Althaus, who founded Oklahoma rare earth miner USA Rare Earth in 2019.“They’re looking at setting up sort of a buyers’ club, if you will,” said Althaus, who now is working to develop new mines in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as CEO of Cove Capital. “The key producers and key consumers of critical minerals will sort of get together and work on pricing structures, floor pricing and other things.”The government last week also made its fourth direct investment in an American critical minerals producer when it extended $1.6 billion to USA Rare Earth in exchange for stock and a repayment agreement.Seeking government funding these days is like meeting with private equity investors because officials are scrutinizing companies to ensure anyone they invest in can deliver, Althaus said. And the government is demanding terms designed to generate a return for taxpayers as loans are repaid and stock prices increase, he said. The stockpile strategy Meanwhile, the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s board this week approved the $10 billion loan the largest in its history to help finance the setup of the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. It is tasked with ensuring access to critical minerals and related products for manufacturers, including battery maker Clarios, energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova, digital storage company Western Digital and aerospace giant Boeing, according to the policy bank.Bank President and Chairman John Jovanovic told CNBC that the project creates a public-private partnership formula that “is uniquely suited and puts America’s best foot forward.”“What it does is it creates a scenario where there are no free riders. Everybody pitches in to solve this huge problem,” he said.Manufacturers, which benefit the most from the reserve, are making a long-term financial commitment, Jovanovic said, while the government loan spurs private investments.The stockpile strategy may help spark a “more organic” pricing model that excludes China, which has used its dominance to flood the market with lower-priced products to squeeze out competitors, said Wade Senti, president of the U.S. permanent magnet company AML.The Trump administration also has injected public money directly into the sector. The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China. Efforts get some bipartisan support A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals. The lawmakers applauded the steps by the Trump administration.“It’s a clear sign that there is bipartisan support for securing a robust domestic supply of critical minerals that both reduces our reliance on China and stabilizes the market,” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Todd Young, R-Ind., said in a joint statement Tuesday.Building up a stockpile will help American companies weather future rare earth supply disruptions, but that will likely be a long-term effort because the materials are still scarce right now with China’s restrictions, said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”The Trump administration has focused on reinvigorating critical minerals production, but Abraham said it’s also important to encourage development of manufacturing that will use them. He noted that Trump’s decisions to cut incentives for electric vehicles and wind turbines have undercut demand for these elements in America. Didi Tang, Josh Funk and Matthew Lee, Associated Press
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