If this is the year of publicly-traded companies signaling to Wall Street that they’re going to do more with less, in preparation for an AI-driven economy, add Verizon to the list of giants cutting a substantial number of jobs in a pivot.

The company, newly led by former PayPal mogul Dan Schulman, said Thursday that it is reducing its workforce by 13,000 employees and cutting its outsourced and outside labor expenses. As of the end of Dec. 2024, Verizon had 99,600 full-time staffers, some 88 percent of them are based in the U.S.

IN LETTERS SENT to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The operator of a so-called ”nudification” site has been fined for failing to put in age verification measures, which are required under online safety laws.

The regulator Ofcom investigated Itai Tech Ltd, which provides AI tools allowing users to edit images to seemingly remove someone’s clothing.

On Thursday, Ofcom said it had fined the company £50,000 for its age check failings, plus an additional £5,000 for not responding to its information requests.

BBC News has contacted Itai Tech Ltd for comment.

Kevin Spacey has admitted that he is homeless due to a career downturn following the sexual assault accusations made against him.

The Oscar-winner was once one of the most in-demand names in the industry, known for his work on films such as The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, Horrible Bosses,and the Netflix TV show House Of Cards.

However, the actor was accused of sexual assault by Anthony Rapp in 2017, with a number of other accusers then coming forward in the next few years. In 2022, a jury in New York found that Spacey wasn’t liable for battery in relation to Rapp’s accusations, and the following year, a court in the UK found him not guilty of nine counts of alleged sexual assault.

With ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country’s top health official, a federal webpage that previously laid out the ample evidence refuting the misinformation that vaccines cause autism was abruptly replaced Wednesday with an anti-vaccine screed that promotes the false link.

It’s a move that is sure to be celebrated by Kennedy’s fringe anti-vaccine followers, but will only sow more distrust, fear, and confusion among the public, further erode the country’s crumbling vaccination rates, and ultimately lead to more disease, suffering, and deaths from vaccine-preventable infections, particularly among children and the most vulnerable.