1 minute read

ICYMI: Biggest winter break headlines by the numbers

AURORA SILAVONG Staff Writer

It took 15 grueling voting rounds for former House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to secure the necessary 218 votes to become Speaker of the House. While the majority of the GOP supported the California Republican, a group of far-right representatives held the process hostage in exchange for concessions from McCarthy. is election was the rst time in a century where a Speaker was not elected on the rst round of voting and constituted the highest number of voting rounds since the Civil War.

Advertisement

It has been a brutal couple of months for the tech industry as Alphabet, the parent company of search engine Google, is eliminating some 12,000 jobs, which constitutes 6% of its entire workforce. Tech giant Microso will lay o 10,000 of its employees, and Amazon will be going forward with the 18,000 job cuts it announced back in November.

In the uncertain economic climate of 2023, with growth stalled by in ation and change in consumers’ habits, these companies found their pandemic-era workforces unsustainable.

China unceremoniously dropped its “zero COVID” policy as rates of infection and deaths surge in the country. Japan, notorious for its strict approach to combating the virus, is considering downgrading the disease’s threat classi cation to on-par with the seasonal u. e COVID-19 situation remains stable in the U.S. with no indication of worsening to 2020 levels. However, there is a new variant known as “Kraken” making its rounds, accounting for nearly half of all new cases in the country.

e FBI searched the home of President Joe Biden for 13 hours on Friday in an ongoing investigation into classi ed documents discovered in his former o ce at the Penn Biden Center in Washington D.C. and at his private residence in Delaware. Although the documents were initially uncovered in November, the Biden administration did not publicize the ndings until the new year, drawing criticism from both parties and parallels to former president Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of hundreds of classi ed documents found at his Florida residence.

This article is from: