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Wind-driven wildfires that were among South Korea’s worst ever have ravaged the country’s southern regions, killing 24 people, destroying more than 200 structures, and forcing 27,000 residents to evacuate, officials said Wednesday.The death toll included a pilot who died after a helicopter crashed during efforts to contain a blaze in the southeastern town of Uiseong, one of the hardest-hit areas. The aircraft had no other crew members. Police said that most of the dead are those in their 60s and 70s.The National Fire Agency said at least 26 people sustained varying degrees of injuries.An ancient Buddhist temple, houses, factories, and vehicles were destroyed in the wildfires that have burned 43,330 acres (17,535 hectares), the government’s emergency response center said.In a televised address, South Korea’s acting President Han Duck-soo said the wildfires that began last Friday were worse than many previous ones.“Damages are snowballing,” Han said. “There are concerns that we’ll have wildfire damages that we’ve never experienced, so we have to concentrate all our capabilities to put out the wildfires in the rest of this week.”Han said crews struggled to extinguish the wildfires because strong winds swept the areas overnight. He also said about 4,650 firefighters, soldiers, and other personnel were working Wednesday with the help of about 130 helicopters, adding that “a small amount” of 5-10 millimeters (0.1-0.3 inches) of rain was expected Thursday.As of Wednesday evening, firefighters were tackling at least four active wildfires, including in the southeastern coastal town of Yeongdeok, which alerted residents of the nearest village to evacuate to an indoor gymnasium.Strong winds and smoke-filled skies forced authorities in the southeastern city of Andong to order evacuations in two villages, including Puncheon, home to the Hahoe folk villagea UNESCO World Heritage Site founded around the 14th15th century. Hikers were advised to leave the scenic Jiri Mountain, one of the country’s largest national parks, as another fire spread closer.Observers say the ongoing wildfires are the third biggest in South Korea’s history in terms of land burned. The largest fires were in Andong, the neighboring counties of Uiseong and Sancheong, and the city of Ulsan.On Tuesday, officials said firefighters had extinguished most of the flames from the largest wildfires in those areas, but wind and dry conditions allowed them to spread again.The blaze in Uiseong destroyed about 20 of the 30 buildings and structures at Gounsa, a temple said to be originally built in the 7th century. Among the burned structures were two state-designated “treasures”a pavilion-shaped building erected overlooking a stream in 1668, and a Joseon dynasty structure built in 1904 to mark the longevity of a king.Meanwhile, the Justice Ministry said it protectively removed 500 inmates from a detention center in Cheongsong, another southern town, but no damages were reported to the facility.The Korea Forest Service said it had raised its wildfire warning to the highest level nationwide, requiring local governments to assign more workers to emergency response, tighten entry restrictions for forests and parks, and recommend that military units withhold live-fire exercises.Among the dead were four firefighters and government workers who died in Sancheong on Saturday after being trapped by fast-moving flames driven by strong winds, according to officials.Government officials suspect human error caused several of the fires, possibly due to the use of fire while clearing overgrown grass in family tombs or sparks from welding work. Kim Tong-Hyung and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press
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Activist and advocate Tarana Burke has spent 30 years raising awareness of sexual violence and working to eradicate it. Burke, who currently serves as the chief vision officer of the nonprofit organization Me Too Movement, coined the phrase “Me Too” in 2006 as a way show young women of color who had experienced sexual violence that they were not alone. The phrase took off as a hashtag on social media in 2017 in the wake of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other high-profile men. Since then, Burke’s organization has partnered with groups including &Rise, Black Women’s Blueprint, and Callisto to support survivors of sexual violence in more than 80 countries. Burke spoke at the Fast Company Grill at South by Southwest about how advances in generative AI can lead to sexual violence, what the current political climate means for Me Too, and her organizations agenda for the next couple of years. Earlier this month, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who stepped down amid a barrage of sexual harassment allegations, announced that hes running for New York City mayor. We also have a president and members of his cabinet accused of sexual assault. How do you feel about this? I’m a little angry. I just want us to do better and dream better and think bigger. There’s so many people who say that they care about this issue. The issue of sexual and gender-based violence is really at pandemic levels in this country. There are so many people who are like, I want this to end. What can we do about it? What you can do when things like this happen, is figure out where the line is and hold the line. We keep moving it and pushing it. You have somebody like Cuomo, a governor who stepped down from his position. A governor who has both a Department of Justice investigation and an investigation by his own Attorney General into the allegations against him. If we actually want these things to stop, if we want to make an impact on the issue of sexual and gender-based violence, we cant say, Maybe we can take him even though I know that happened. Right there, when you say that, that is exactly where the issue dies. What do you make of men like this being able to make a comeback? I get asked about the bad actors all the time. When people harm other people, there should be a pathway for the person who caused harm to come back. Sexual violence happens on the spectrum. Accountability should happen on a spectrum. This is not just about throwing people away. What most of us haven’t witnessed is the thing that happens after the harm. Where is the accountability? Where is the person that comes back and says, I understand that this person was harmed and this is what I did to understand that better. This is how I’ve changed. We don’t see that. What we see is people who disappear for a while and then come back. How should we treat survivors in this situation? When a woman is just trying to save her own life, we still think about the man whose life is being ruined. That is fundamentally the problem. We have to fix that. We have to shift that so that there’s enough space for us to get what we need. We say “believe survivors” because we want survivors to have the respect and dignity of investigation. If you believe me, you won’t try to undermine me. You won’t ask me questions like, Why were you wearing this? Or what were you doing? You’re going to start from the premise that I’m telling the truth. And if you think somebody’s telling the truth, then you’re going to help them get the resources they need. Sometimes that’s an investigation and that helps everybody involved. If you’re the person being accused or you’re the person who has the accusation, everybody involved should be treated with respect and humanity. It’s not going to always be comfortable though. There’s a misconception that you deserve comfort, that we have to create a life where you’re never uncomfortable. I just referenced some examples in politics and entertainment. Do you get frustrated that these industries get the bulk of media coverage and attention? One of the biggest challenges, and probably the saddest part, of the viral moment around Me Too, is that it created so much attention around people who cause harm or people who have been accused of causing harm. I tell people this all the time. You had millions and millions of people around the world who raised their hand to say, This happened to me, too. But you wouldn’t know the hashtag, you wouldn’t know any of that, if it wasn’t for the celebrities and politicians. Then we immediately took our eyes off the survivors. And so it is harmful when the news cycle is only talking about the Me Too movement when some other person has been accused or to tell us that we’re dead again. We created the organization to be a container for the movement because we knew we couldn’t depend on mainstream media or politicians to do that. Since the height of the Me Too movement in 2017when you were, along with other activists, Time‘s person of the yeardo you think weve seen a true cultural shift? Sexual violence has a history that goes all the way back to the Bible. There’s no way that a hashtag was going to erase that. I think the leaps and bounds [of progress] that we’ve seen in the last seven years would’ve probably taken 20 years without that viral moment. That said, we still have a ways to go. Those front-page moments never last. But what has lasted is the policies that have been changed, the laws that have been changed, but also the way people think and talk about it. We have given the world language and a way to talk about sexual violence. We’ve given survivors a community. So there has been a cultural shift, but it hasn’t shifted enough. You’re talking about power structures that have existed for so long. Patriarchy is a structure that has existed for so long. So we’ve made a dent in that. Of course, the pendulum is going to try to swing back the other way. We would be foolish not to expect that. The difference is that when it swings back this time, we are coming with a different analysis. Twenty-one-year-olds grew up with the Me Too movement. They’re going into college now with a particular analysis around that. They have less shame about talking about things that have happened to them, and they’re really clear about what they will not allow to happen to them. What kinds of trends are you seeing in the larger movement to combat sexual and gender-based violence? Funding for sexual and gender-based violence is at an all-time low. We’ve actually seen in the last five years that several of the foundations that support this work have either closed or have closed their portfolios. That predates this administration. It’s something that has been happening globally. So it is very difficult to fund the work to end sexual and gender-based violence. We talk about this as something that’s not solvable, but this is a solvable issue. I often use the example of [former New York City Mayor] Mike Bloomberg. He decided about 25 years ago that he wanted to make America smoke-free. What he did was he invested more than $20 billion in making us smoke free. Now, if you light a cigarette anywhere, people are like, Oh my God, who’s smoking? Now, yes, people still smoke, but we had multiple interventions because of that investment. We had research that came out talking about secondhand smoke will kill you. We had legal interventions where the tobacco industry was sued. We had research intrventions and we had cultural interventions. Imagine if that was the kind of intervention we had around sexual and gender based violence where we had a curriculum in schools that taught children year over year about consent, not just one time in the 12th grade in front of a computer. Imagine if we had research that showed us the medical effects that sexual trauma has on people. So my point is, we need more funding across the board because this is a solvable issue. #MeToo harnessed the power of social media to spread a message. Now, Xs algorithm has changed, and the social media landscape has become pretty toxic. Do you think its still a useful medium? Just because the tool becomes weaponized, doesn’t take away its usefulness. It’s really about how we use it and the safety measures that we put in place. Tech has facilitated gender-based violence. There’s a new app where they can undress you based on a fully dressed picture. Character AI is another thing. There’s ways in which violence is being perpetuated through social media and online. It’s the new frontier. How are you harnessing tech to further your organizations mission? Were working on something that we call Digital Direct Service. When Me Too went viral, so many survivors were like, what can Me Too do for me? So we set up a database of resources. Those resources are deeply diversified. When I was doing this work with young Black girls in the South, I could never find resources that were specific to them. So when we built this resource database, we wanted to make sure you could filter to find yourself. You can be a disabled trans veteran and a survivor. You can put all of these things into our website. You can say, this happened to me in college, this happened to me as a child. And you can find what you need specifically. The other thing we have is our Pride and Joy Survivors Sanctuary. It’s an online healing platform and it’s free. We have a variety of videos from as short as five minutes to as long as 30 minutes. What else is on your organizations agenda in the next year or two? The other way we focus our attention is engaging survivors from a place of power. People often engage survivors of sexual and gender-based violence from a place of pity. But survivors are the most powerful people that you can encounter. We’ve already come through the worst of the worst and landed on the other side. I’m really excited about the idea of building a constituency. Imagine us voting along the lines of our survivorship. And there’s millions of us as a voting bloc. I’m really interested in how we take that trauma, how we take those experiences, and turn them into power for people. Then the third thing is our global work. We’re called Me Too International because it’s a global movement. We have a network in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and in some parts of Europe. A large part of it is from 134 [partner] organizations across 70 countries. We come into those conversations not from a place of US imperialism. We come to it saying, listen, what’s happening here is also happening in America.
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E-Commerce
A number of big-name tech companies have announced or are said to be planning layoffs this month, in continuation of a trend we saw in February. March 2025s most prominent tech layoffs include those from Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block, online meal kit company HelloFresh, server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), social media giant TikTok, and retailer Wayfairs technology division. Heres what you need to know. Jack Dorsey’s Block lays off over 900 workers Twitter founder Jack Dorseys latest company, Block, has announced that it will cut 931 jobs. Block owns the popular fintech app and platforms Cash App and Square. The 931 laid-off workers represent about 8% of Blocks workforce. Block made the announcement internally in an email Dorsey sent to Block staff. That email was later leaked to TechCrunch. In the email, Dorsey was very specific about why Block was cutting the chosen workers, citing three reasons: eliminating employees that are part of teams that are off strategy” eliminating those who have a below or trending toward a below performance rating” and in order to flatten Blocks organizational hierarchy. Dorsey revealed the exact numbers being cut for each of the three reasons. Strategy cuts totaled 391 people, performance cuts totaled 460 people, and hierarchy cuts totaled 80 managers. Dorsey also announced Block was closing many of its 748 open roles at the company. Were behind in our actions, and thats not fair to the individuals who work here or the company. When we know, we should move, and there hasnt been enough movement, Dorsey said in the email. We need to move to help us meet and stay ahead of the transformational moment our industry is in. Block declined Fast Company’s request for comment. HelloFresh axes 273 jobs in Texas Online meal kit company HelloFresh has revealed that it is set to eliminate nearly 300 positions at a facility in Texas, reported GroceryDive. The layoff plans were made public because the company was required to file a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) in the state. WARN notices are required in some states when a company plans mass layoffs. They are intended to give workers and the local community advanced notice. According to HelloFreshs WARN notice, 273 workers at its Grand Prairie, Texas, distribution center will lose their jobs on May 13. In an email to GroceryDive, HelloFresh confirmed the layoffs, which are being made because the company is consolidating its operations in the state to its Irving, Texas, location. As the meal kit market normalizes, we are now focused on diversifying our product offerings and driving profitable growth by optimizing our operational footprint, a company spokesperson said in the email. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to consolidate our operations in Texas. Hewlett Packard Enterprise cuts 2,500 jobs In what is the largest known tech mass layoff in March, server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced during its recent earnings report that it would cut 2,500 jobs. As noted by CNBC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it is seeking to achieve $350 million in gross savings by fiscal 2027. Part of those savings will come from the 2,500 job cuts, which are expected over the next 18 months. That equates to about 5% of Hewlett Packard Enterprises workforce. Despite its name, its important to note that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a separate, distinct company from consumer computer maker Hewlett Packard (HP). HPE separated from HP nearly a decade ago. However, its worth pointing out that HPEs March job cuts follow HPs job cuts last month. In February, consumer computer maker Hewlett-Packard announced it would be cutting 2,000 workers. TikTok could cut 300 jobs in Ireland Social media giant TikTok is another tech company that might see job cuts. However, these cuts are limited to its operations in Ireland. As reported by Irelands public broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the countrys minister for enterprise, tourism and employment said it was his understanding that TikTok will cut around 300 jobs at its Dublin headquarters. The job cuts will reportedly happen in April. TikTok is said to employ almost 3,000 individuals at its Dublin headquarters, meaning the job cuts will impact about 10% of its workforce there. We’ve reached out to TikTok for comment. Wayfair Inc. to cut around 340 technology team members Home goods e-commerce giant Wayfair revealed in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 7 that it is initiating a workforce reduction. According to the filing, Wayfair will let go approximately 340 members of the companys Technology team. These changes reflect efforts to reshape, streamline and refocus the Companys Technology organization after completing significant modernization and replatforming milestones, Wayfair wrote in its 8-K. Wayfair says that it employs more than 12,000 people across North America and Europe. Tech layoffs reach nearly 25,000 in 2025 so far With the layoffs above, as well as others through the month of March, total layoffs for the tech industry since the year began currently stand at 24,313, according to data compiled by tech layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi. The site says that so far in 2025, 90 companies have announced tech-related layoffs. To put the nearly 25,000 figure into more perspective, in all of 2024, Layoffs.fyi says there were just over 152,000 tech layoffs. And in all of 2023, there were over 264,000.
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