Month: November 2022

A judge in Virginia ruled Wednesday that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich must testify in front of a special grand jury in Georgia before the end of the month.  Siding with prosecutors, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Robert Smith said Gingrich must testify in front of the special grand jury in Atlanta before Nov. 29. The 79-year-old Gingrich has repeatedly attempted to avoid testifying in the probe, arguing that the appearance in Atlanta was “not necessary and would impose an undue hardship.”

The probe, which was launched last year by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, is investigating possible interference by then-president Donald Trump and others in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis is seeking to question Gingrich about contact he had with Trump’s campaign in 2020, when Gingrich is accused of pushing for television ads to promote “the false narrative that election workers had smuggled suitcases containing fake ballots” into a location where ballots were being counted. In court filings, Willis has called Gingrich a “necessary and material witness for the investigation.”

Gingrich’s attorney John Burlingame said his client would likely appeal the decision, arguing that Gingrich’s upcoming appearance before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol should spare Gingrich from the separate probe in Georgia. That interview is scheduled for Nov. 21.

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Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has announced over 11,000 layoffs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to employees Wednesday: “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”

According to the the message from Zuckerberg, employees who are laid off will receive “16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.” The layoffs follow a cost-cutting trend among big tech companies; Amazon recently announced that they would be extending a hiring freeze, and Apple is instituting a partial hiring freeze in October. Twitter announced drastic layoffs after being purchased by Elon Musk last month.

Zuckerberg, who attributed the layoffs to poor investments in the wake of COVID-19, also said: “We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1 … At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments.”

Zuckerberg said in his statement that the strategy of increased investments backfired: “Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected.”

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