
Paramount to lay off 3.5% of US staff in latest job cut, memo shows
Paramount Global is laying off 3.5% of its U.S. staff in the latest round of job cuts as the company grapples with a decline in cable TV subscribers, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
The layoff was communicated to its staff on Tuesday morning and it could affect some non-U.S. workforce over time, the memo from the office of the company's three co-CEOs showed.
This is in addition to the 15% cuts Paramount had announced last August and comes as the media industry navigates a 'generational disruption' as millions of cable users cut the cord and opt for streaming services such as Netflix.
'We are taking the hard, but necessary steps to further streamline our organization starting this week,'? Paramount Co-CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins wrote in the memo.
Paramount had 18,600 employees as of Dec. 31, 2024. CNBC first reported the development on Tuesday.
Paramount channels, including CBS and Nickelodeon, to go dark on YouTube TV
The company has pitched its $8.4 billion merger with billionaire scion David Ellison's Skydance Media.
But the deal is yet to secure regulatory approval, pending a $10 billion lawsuit U.S. President Donald Trump filed against CBS News in October over an interview with then-vice president Kamala Harris that he alleged was deceptively edited to favor Harris.
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Business Recorder
2 hours ago
- Business Recorder
US slams UN conference on Israel-Palestinian issue, warns of consequences
PARIS: U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is discouraging governments around the world from attending a U.N. conference next week on a possible two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, according to a U.S. cable seen by Reuters. The diplomatic demarche, sent on Tuesday, says countries that take 'anti-Israel actions' following the conference will be viewed as acting in opposition to U.S. foreign policy interests and could face diplomatic consequences from Washington. The demarche, which was not previously reported, runs squarely against the diplomacy of two close allies France and Saudi Arabia, who are co-hosting the gathering next week in New York that aims to lay out the parameters for a roadmap to a Palestinian state, while ensuring Israel's security. 'We are urging governments not to participate in the conference, which we view as counterproductive to ongoing, life-saving efforts to end the war in Gaza and free hostages,' read the cable. President Emmanuel Macron has suggested France could recognise a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territories at the conference. French officials say they have been working to avoid a clash with the U.S., Israel's staunchest major ally. UN conference on two-state solution to Mideast conflict set for June 'The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognise a conjectural Palestinian state, which adds significant legal and political obstacles to the eventual resolution of the conflict and could coerce Israel during a war, thereby supporting its enemies,' the cable read. The United States for decades backed a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians that would create a state for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel. Trump, in his first term, was relatively tepid in his approach to a two-state solution, a longtime pillar of U.S. Middle East policy. The Republican president has given little sign of where he stands on the issue in his second term. But on Tuesday, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a long-time vocal supporter of Israel, said he did not think an independent Palestinian state remained a U.S. foreign policy goal. Gaza war 'Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state would effectively render Oct. 7 Palestinian Independence Day,' the cable read, referring to when Palestinian Hamas carried out a cross-border attack from Gaza on Israel in 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Hamas' attack triggered Israel's air and ground war in Gaza in which almost 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of the 2.3 million population displaced and the enclave widely reduced to rubble. If Macron went ahead, France, home to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities, would become the first Western heavyweight to recognise a Palestinian state. This could lend greater momentum to a movement hitherto dominated by smaller nations generally more critical of Israel. Macron's stance has shifted amid Israel's intensified Gaza offensive and escalating violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, and there is a growing sense of urgency in Paris to act now before the idea of a two-state solution vanishes forever. The U.S. cable said Washington had worked tirelessly with Egypt and Qatar to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, free the hostages and end the conflict. 'This conference undermines these delicate negotiations and emboldens Hamas at a time when the terrorist group has rejected proposals by the negotiators that Israel has accepted.' This week Britain and Canada, also G7 allies of the United States, were joined by other countries in placing sanctions on two Israeli far-right government ministers to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring the Gaza war to an end. 'The United States opposes the implied support of the conference for potential actions including boycotts and sanctions on Israel as well as other punitive measures,' the cable read. Israel has repeatedly criticised the conference, saying it rewards Hamas for the attack on Israel, and it has lobbied France against recognising a Palestinian state. 'Nothing surprises me anymore, but I don't see how many countries could step back on their participation,' said a European diplomat, who asked for anonymity due to the subject's sensitivity. 'This is bullying, and of a stupid type.' The U.S. State Department and the French Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


Express Tribune
4 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Twilight of the Empire
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The system has depended on the continuous inflow of surplus capital from export-heavy economies, including China and Germany, to America's debt-saturated financial architecture. The US trade deficit reached an eye-watering $1.1 trillion in 2023, a figure that dwarfs those of other peripheral or semi-peripheral economies like India. In this light, Trump's populist howl against the 'indignity' of the American people, dispossessed in the very belly of global wealth, is not entirely misplaced. His instinct that endless wars serve as spectacles to obscure the real mechanism of American hegemony – the global dollar-debt regime – is accurate in a crude, pre-theoretical sense. Since the late 1960s, when America ceased being a surplus nation, its geopolitical muscle has rested not on production but on its control of the dollar as the global reserve currency. The military-industrial complex is merely the theatrical wing of a deeper financial imperialism. However, Trump is radically mistaken in his belief that punitive tariffs and protectionist swagger will resurrect 'Middle America.' Tariffs, in the late neoliberal stage, cannot revive industrial capacity gutted by decades of offshoring and rentier capitalism. Instead, they risk destabilising the very mechanism whereby America's status as a debtor empire is transformed into an asset: the recycling of dollar-denominated debt into US capital markets. If that circuit is broken, the paper wealth of Wall Street and the speculative empires of Trump's own class will collapse. To materially uplift the working and lower-middle classes that fuelled his electoral resurgence, Trump would have to declare war not on China or Brussels, but on Manhattan and Malibu, hedge funds, private equity, and speculative real estate. 'Asymmetric interdependence' For much of the post-World War II period, what was marketed as 'globalisation' was, in fact, an imperial project cloaked in liberal universals. It was the projection of American state-capitalist hegemony through a scaffold of multilateral institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO – and the sacrosanct status of the dollar as the planetary currency-signifier. These were not neutral frameworks but instruments of asymmetric interdependence: the United States exported capital, debt, and ideology, while importing dependence, discipline, and surplus labour from the periphery and semi-periphery. The so-called "Washington Consensus" was never a consensus but a diktat. The system also functioned through a deeper ideological fantasy that free markets and global rule-based order were apolitical, universal, and benign. However, even most liberal-internationalist critiques warn the fantasy is fraying. The very interdependence that sustained US primacy is in retreat. Firms and governments worldwide need American consumers, capital markets, and alliances, giving Washington soft coercive power. Trump's tactics have upended that balance. By 'assailing interdependence,' the administration is chipping away at the very basis of American advantage. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argue that order depends on stable power balances, shared norms, and sustaining institutions. Trump has shaken all three. What follows is a deeper drift into disorder, one that won't resolve until Washington either reorients itself or is overtaken by a new dispensation. The plunge may already be underway. 'In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called 'the American century'—to an unceremonious end,' they write in a Foreign Affairs essay. The weaponisation of the global economy hollows out the very symbolic order the US once used to legitimate its rule. By shrinking its adversaries' strategic space, Washington also corrodes the interconnected lattice that once lent credibility and allure to its empire. A tariff here, a blacklist there, and the freezing of foreign bank reserves – each may win tactical advantage, but at the cost of eroding the trust that underpinned the liberal international order. After all, what merchant or government would dare anchor long-term plans to a system where every node can be severed by a presidential signature? Trump's disruption is risky for the US precisely because new economic blocs are emerging from the wreckage of Western hegemony. Many leaders of the Global South remember colonialism and feel the 21st century liberates them from Western diktats. Where the US once posed as the sole path to progress, China's tech power and Russia's security reach now appear less like threats and more like counterweights. On soft power's front, when natural disasters strike or epidemics spread, Western-style NGOs and media have lost some of their framing power, as Chinese and Russian aid convoys now appear on television alongside those from the Red Cross. The velvet-glove diplomacy of the Cold War years – teddy bears over bombers – has been largely replaced by quarantine diplomacy, vaccine pledges, and once-dominant American development agencies playing second fiddle to Belt-and-Road contracts. In May, a major Democracy Perception Index reported that majorities of people worldwide now see the US negatively. The pollster noted that after Trump's return to the White House, America's reputation 'took a particularly massive hit in EU countries' and fell sharply everywhere. Even NATO founder Anders Fogh Rasmussen sighed that the US' standing was 'unloved' across most of the world. By contrast, China's image is improving globally, even overtaking the US in overall favourability in most regions. At home, the US is cannibalising its future. Budget cuts to core research agencies like the NSF and NIH are hollowing out the very ecosystem that once drove American innovation. Labs shrink, fellowships vanish, and global talent turns to Beijing, Singapore, or the UAE – where funding flows and visas follow. Meanwhile, China invests aggressively in semiconductors, AI, and green tech, eroding the US edge. As Oxford's Carl Benedikt Frey puts it, Trump's agenda risks dismantling the pillars of US innovation. Technological leadership is not a birthright but is built. And Washington is letting it rot. Trump's move to turn tariff-penalties and export bans into blunt instruments has worried many that he was abandoning existing rules and undermining the soft power that Washington has spent decades building. Analysts argue that American power rests on a blend of hard force and attraction, even though this very soft power has enabled hard power interventions. Interdependence with trading partners and multilateral institutions generates US leverage, while global admiration for 'American culture and ideals' makes allies pliant, they argue. Trump's assault on trade pacts and international agencies undercuts the foundation of American power and accelerates the erosion of the postwar order. In principle, if American power were absolute, it could force partners into line indefinitely. In practice, aggressive trade measures are sowing resentments. Many countries have been party to US-led trade deals expecting mutual benefit – now they wonder if Washington will simply upend their exports to punish political stances. The WTO and other legal venues, for a long time arenas where small states could begrudge larger ones, are being largely sidelined. Without clear enforcement, the most vulnerable economies will look for alternative blocs or simply bribe each other to stay out of the US orbit. The cruellest irony is that by inflicting pain on others – or threatening to – the US is undermining the very goodwill and partnerships that underpinned its postwar hegemony. The writer is a Lahore-based senior journalist


Express Tribune
10 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Trump ready to mediate Kashmir dispute: US State Dept
US President Donald Trump speaks during a swearing-in ceremony for the new US ambassador to China, former US Senator David Perdue, at the White House in Washington, DC, US on May 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS Listen to article President Donald Trump is willing to help mediate the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, the US State Department has said. Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday, spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the president's efforts are consistently aimed at resolving deep-rooted global conflicts. 'President Trump has been the only one to bring certain people to the table to have conversations that nobody thought were possible,' she said. 'It shouldn't surprise anyone that he'd want to manage something like that.' READ MORE: After truce, Trump eyes Kashmir deal When asked whether the US administration might support a UN Security Council resolution or host leaders from both countries, Bruce said she could not speak to the president's future plans. As much as Modi gang doesn't want to hear the K word, the state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce blasts again. She says mediation on Kashmir between India and Pakistan is very much on the mind of President Trump. — Murtaza Solangi (@murtazasolangi) June 11, 2025 'But the world knows his nature,' she said. 'It is an exciting time... and I hope perhaps something like that can also get resolved before the President [leaves office].' Bruce also confirmed PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari met Under Secretary for Political Affairs Allison Hooker during a visit to Washington last week. 'They reiterated US support for the ongoing ceasefire — as you might imagine, thank God — between Pakistan and India,' said State Department spokesperson Bruce. 'They also discussed important issues to the bilateral relationship, including counterterrorism cooperation.' The Pakistani delegation visited Washington from May 31 to June 6, meeting more than a dozen US lawmakers and senior State Department officials. Bilawal Bhutto also presented Pakistan's views on Indian military actions, rising regional tensions, and concern over the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. Read: India laying ground for 'first nuclear water war', says Bilawal Indian parliamentary delegation was also in Washington during the same period. Deputy Secretary Landau met the group and reaffirmed strong US support for India in its counterterrorism efforts and broader strategic ties. Last month following a brief military standoff, the US announced a ceasefire on May 10. President Trump later wrote on Truth Social: 'I will work with you, both to see if, after a 'thousand years,' a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir.' READ MORE: 'I got that war stopped': Trump on Pakistan-India ceasefire Pakistan welcomed the offer, while India rejected it, maintaining that Kashmir is strictly a bilateral matter. In an interview with AFP, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari urged US President Donald Trump to play an active role in bringing India to the negotiating table for comprehensive talks with Pakistan. He emphasised that while Pakistan remains open to discussions on terrorism, the Kashmir conflict must be the central focus of any meaningful dialogue. Earlier, President Trump praised Pakistan's handling of recent tensions with India, calling its leadership 'very strong.' Speaking alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump remarked, 'Some people won't like when I say that, but it is what it is,' and credited his diplomatic efforts for helping de-escalate the crisis.