UPS said today it plans to eliminate an additional 30,000 operational jobs this year as the shipping giant continues to wind down its partnership with Amazon -- previously its largest customer -- and push forward a broader turnaround strategy under CEO Carol Tome.

CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds.

Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind.

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Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

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The author, whose family has been impacted by dementia, says provision in living wills could clarify intentions when a person declines to the point they are ‘alive and dead all at once’

Legalised assisted dying should “gradually” be extended to dementia sufferers, the author Ian McEwan has said.

McEwan was “shocked by the snow-drilling attempts” by those opposed to the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public book event in London, citing its more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers backing the bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged filibustering.

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The White House’s tone might be softening after outrage about the Minnesota ICE shootings, but there’s no reason to expect a policy shift

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Has the US entered the darkest period of Donald Trump’s second term? It certainly feels like it. The Trump administration’s cruel obsession with immigration had already yielded imprisonments, deaths and deportations, but the recent trend of immigration agents gunning down US citizens in the streets surely represents a painful new step.

The government’s immediate reaction to the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed less than three weeks apart in Minneapolis, have only intensified the air of menace.

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This weekend sees the release of a controversially funded film about the first lady, directed by a disgraced film-maker

It’s not often that a presidential administration faces a direct referendum at the box office. Sure, there was more than a hint of rebuke in Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 unexpectedly becoming the biggest-grossing non-music-or-nature documentary of all time (and highest full stop in North America) while taking re-election-year shots at George W Bush (who went on to squeak out another victory anyway). But that movie was also sold on Moore himself, a recent Oscar winner and fixture in both film and television by that point. Bush was excoriated, but he wasn’t exactly getting top billing. The unambiguous star of this weekend’s Trump-approved documentary is right there in the title: Melania. It’s coming to 1,500 theaters this weekend from Amazon/MGM.

Relatively few documentaries receive a wide release (though Melania is going out in about half as many theaters as last weekend’s Amazon release, the Chris Pratt vehicle Mercy), so comparison points are relatively few. Box office predictions generally place the movie well under Moore’s unlikely high-water mark for the form. Some are guessing the opening weekend will pull in about $1m, which would comfortably keep it off the list of the worst wide openings of all time (the record low for a new release in around 1,500 theaters is about $330,000) but would nonetheless qualify it as a bomb. Others estimate that it will go as high as $5m, putting it in line with rightwing docs like Am I Racist?, the highest-grossing documentary of 2024, which ended its run with $12m. As the Hollywood Reporter points out, technically inching ahead of Am I Racist? and the recent faith-based After Death would boast the biggest non-music launch for a documentary of the past decade.

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These are the agencies detaining people across the US – mostly, but not all, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security

When the Trump administration ordered a surge of armed federal immigration enforcement personnel on to the streets of Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security declared it the largest operation in its history and the liberal midwestern city became Donald Trump’s latest chosen hotspot.

Such escalations mark the US president’s agenda of mass arrests and deportations from the US interior. The highest-profile efforts involve officers from multiple agencies rushing to prominent Democratic-led US cities, against local leaders’ wishes. But coast to coast, federal officers have been raiding homes, businesses, commercial parking lots – even schools, hospitals and courthouses. The efforts have delighted the president’s hardcore Make America Great Again voter base, but are also tearing families apart and spreading fear and even death on the streets and in detention.

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AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index op de Amsterdamse aandelenbeurs is woensdag met verlies gesloten, waarmee een eerdere plus uit handen werd gegeven. Die neergang kwam door een koersdaling van ASML. De chipmachinemaker leverde een flinke winst van eerder op de dag in, ondanks sterke cijfers en vooruitzichten. ASML eindigde uiteindelijk 1,9 procent in het rood. Bij opening steeg het aandeel nog ruim 7 procent.

Het orderboek en de omzet van ASML klommen in het afgelopen kwartaal naar recordniveaus, aangejaagd door de grote vraag naar de geavanceerde machines van het bedrijf uit Veldhoven om chips voor toepassingen rond kunstmatige intelligentie te maken. ASML rekent voor dit jaar op verdere groei. Daarnaast schrapt ASML ongeveer 1700 managementbanen omdat de organisatie volgens het bedrijf "te stroef" is geworden. Branchegenoten ASMI en Besi verloren respectievelijk 1,2 en 3,6 procent.

De AEX eindigde 0,5 procent lager op 997,13 punten. Daarmee zakte de hoofdgraadmeter weer onder de 1000 punten. De MidKap steeg 0,4 procent tot 993,04 punten. Frankfurt en Londen daalden tot 0,5 procent. De CAC 40 in Parijs ging ruim 1 procent omlaag.

Shell

Shell werd 1,5 procent duurder dankzij de stijgende olieprijzen. Koplopers bij de hoofdfondsen waren chemicaliëndistributeur IMCD en verzekeraar Aegon met plussen tot 2,6 procent.

Telecombedrijf KPN stond juist bij de dalers met een min van 0,6 procent na bekendmaking van resultaten die minder goed werden ontvangen door beleggers. Betalingsverwerker Adyen was hekkensluiter in de AEX met een verlies van 3,9 procent.

MidKap

In de MidKap was industrieel toeleverancier Aalberts aanvoerder met een winst van 6,3 procent. Biotechnoloog Pharming sloot de rij bij de middelgrote bedrijven op Beursplein 5 met een daling van 3,9 procent.

LVMH ging op de beurs in Parijs 7,9 procent onderuit. Het moederbedrijf van luxemerken als Louis Vuitton en Christian Dior zag de omzet en winst vorig jaar dalen. In Frankfurt verloor Deutsche Bank 2 procent. De Duitse autoriteiten hebben kantoren van de bank in Frankfurt en Berlijn doorzocht in een onderzoek naar witwaspraktijken. Deutsche Bank komt donderdag met cijfers.

BERN (ANP) - Net als de NAVO-landen die het omringen, gaat ook Zwitserland zich herbewapenen. Het Alpenland betaalt dat uit een verhoging van de btw.

Zwitserland steekt al jaren minder dan 1 procent van het bruto binnenlands product in zijn verdediging en was niet van plan dat de komende jaren significant te verhogen. Maar met de grootste oorlog in Europa in tachtig jaar en een verkruimelende wereldorde komt het land daarvan terug. Dat gaat volgens de regering ook aan het zorgvuldig afzijdige Zwitserland niet voorbij. Omdat veel landen zich herbewapenen, zijn de prijzen ook gestegen en is sowieso meer geld nodig om de Zwitserse defensie op peil te houden.

De regering wil de komende jaren omgerekend 34 miljard euro extra aan defensie besteden. Om dat te bekostigen, gaat de nu nog betrekkelijk lage btw tien jaar lang met 0,8 procent omhoog. Daarmee moeten het parlement en de bevolking, in een referendum, nog wel instemmen.

New Order