Author: admin@primenews

Music streaming giant Spotify has announced record profits of over €1bn (£860m) after a year of cutting costs and laying off staff. The Swedish company has been growing its user base for years, offering subscribers access to podcasts and audiobooks. But its quarterly gross profit came at the expense of missing its forecast for monthly active users. Last year it cut 17% of its workforce in a move to clamp down on costs. Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek said last December about 1,500 jobs would be axed as part of “substantial action to rightsize our costs” so that the company could…

The world’s largest study into how childhood trauma affects the brain has offered new hope to survivors. Artificial intelligence (AI) was used to re-examine hundreds of brain scans of people who experienced abuse and acute emotional pain as children. The study, led by the University of Essex, found trauma changes how a young brain develops and affects areas such as problem solving and empathy. Dr Megan Klabunde said it could lead to new treatment to reverse those effects. One in three children and young people will experience a potentially traumatic event by the time they reach 18, according to the UK…

Australia’s leader has called Elon Musk an “arrogant billionaire” in an escalating feud over X’s reluctance to remove footage of a church stabbing. On Monday, an Australian court ordered Mr Musk’s social media firm – formerly called Twitter – to hide videos of last week’s attack in Sydney. X previously said it would comply “pending a legal challenge”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s criticism followed Mr Musk using a meme to accuse his government of censorship. On Tuesday, Mr Albanese told ABC News that Mr Musk “thinks he’s above the law but also above common decency”. Last week Australia’s eSafety Commissioner,…

A growing group of conscious consumers have found other strategies to keep companies honest. Consumers have long wielded their purchasing power to send messages to companies whose stances they disagree with. Boycotts can take the form of personal snubs at a shop, or large-scale, highly publicised movements. While many of these boycotts often fall “into the dustbin of outrage”, swaths of consumers are still more determined than ever to spend with companies whose values and ethics align with their own – and to divert their dollars from companies whose practices don’t. But although it’s simple to pluck an alternative brand from…

A dramatic orange haze has descended over Athens as clouds of dust have blown in from the Sahara desert. It is one of the worst such episodes to hit Greece since 2018, according to officials. Greece had already been struck by similar clouds in late March and early April, which also covered areas of Switzerland and southern France. The skies are predicted to clear on Wednesday, says Greece’s weather service. Air quality has deteriorated in many areas of the country and on Wednesday morning the Acropolis in Athens was no longer visible because of the dust. The cloud has reached…

A union representing Boeing engineers has alleged the plane maker retaliated against two employees who, at the time, were working on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to provide manufacturing oversight. The allegations came to light in recent days after the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of one of the two engineers seeking to uncover a report from Boeing’s (BA) internal investigation into the incident which was filed with the FAA. The complaint and a press release issued Tuesday by the union describe how the two workers “insisted the company reevaluate prior engineering work on…

Shares in Chinese bubble tea chain Sichuan Baicha Baidao failed to pop during their market debut Tuesday, tumbling as much as 38% from their listing price. The company, also known as Chabaidao or ChaPanda, had priced its shares at $17.50 Hong Kong dollars ($2.23) apiece, but they plunged as low as $10.80 Hong Kong dollars ($1.38) in the first two hours of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange. ChaPanda’s shares closed nearly 27% down at $12.80 Hong Kong dollars ($1.63). The company is China’s third-largest retailer of freshly made tea drinks, it said in its IPO prospectus, citing data from…

Google has fired an additional 20 workers that it says were involved in protests last week over the company’s cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government, bringing the total number of workers fired to 50, according to the group organizing the demonstrations. No Tech for Apartheid, the organizers of the protest at Google offices last Tuesday, said in a statement Monday evening that Google had fired an additional 20 workers, on top of the 30 workers terminated last week. No Tech for Apartheid claims that some of the workers fired were “non-participating bystanders” during last Tuesday’s sit-in protests at Google’s offices in New…

Starbucks and the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with protecting workers’ rights, will battle each other before the Supreme Court Tuesday, in one of numerous cases now pending in which major employers are questioning the NLRB’s powers and even its right to exist. The NLRB under the labor-friendly Biden administration has been overseeing a period of significantly more organizing and strike activities by the nation’s unions. Some high-profile companies are complaining that the agency is abusing its powers. The companies are asking federal courts, often with conservative, pro-business judges, to stop the agency from standing behind the…

India is one of the world’s top spacefaring nations. It is the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit, and the fourth on the planet to take a spacecraft to the moon, landing closer to the south pole, known for its cratered terrain, than anyone else has. But its private sector has played a limited role in space exploration, acting mostly as suppliers and vendors for its national space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). That’s changing quickly, owing to a raft of government reforms aiming to boost private participation in the space sector. In the United States, the proliferation of…