Paramount on Wednesday was expected to cut 1,000 employees, the first wave of a deep staff reduction planned since David Ellison took the helm of the entertainment company in August.
People familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment said the layoffs will be felt throughout the company, including at CBS, CBS News, Comedy Central and other cable channels as well as the historic Melrose Avenue film studio.
Another 1,000 jobs are expected to be cut at a later date, bringing the total reduction to about 10% of Paramount’s workforce, sources said.
The move was expected. Paramount’s new owners — Ellison’s Skydance Media and RedBird Capital Partners — had told investors they planned to eliminate more than $2 billion in expenses, and Wednesday’s workforce reduction was a preliminary step toward that goal.
Paramount has been shedding staff for years.
More than 800 people — or about 3.5% of the company’s workforce — were laid off in June, prior to the Ellison family takeover. At the time, Paramount’s management attributed the cuts to the decline of cable television subscriptions and an increased emphasis on bulking up its streaming TV business. In 2024, the company eliminated 2,000 positions, or 15% of its staff.
The Paramount layoffs are the latest sign of contraction across the entertainment and tech sectors.
Amazon said this week it was eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs amid its embrace of artificial intelligence to perform more functions. Last week, Facebook parent company Meta disclosed that it was cutting 600 jobs in its AI division.
Last week, cable and broadband provider Charter Corp., which operates the Spectrum service, eliminated 1,200 management jobs around the country.
Los Angeles’ production economy in particular has been roiled by a falloff in local filming and cost-cutting at major media companies.
As of August, about 112,000 people were employed in the Los Angeles region’s motion picture and sound recording industries — the main category for film and television production. The data does not include everyone who works in the entertainment industry, such as those who work as independent contractors.
That was roughly flat compared with the previous year, and down 27% compared with 2022 levels, when about 154,000 people were employed locally in the industry, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The industry has struggled to rebound since the 2023 strikes by writers and actors, which led to a sharp pullback in studio spending following the era of so-called “peak TV,” when studios dramatically increased the pipeline of shows to build streaming platforms.
“You saw a considerable drop-off from the strikes and the aftermath,” said Kevin Klowden, an executive director at Milken Institute Finance. “The question is, at what point do these workers exit the industry entirely?”
Local film industry officials are expecting a production boost and an increase in work after California bolstered its film and television tax credits.
But Southern California’s bedrock industry is confronting other challenges, including shifting consumer habits and competition from social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
“There is a larger concern in terms of the financial health of all the major operations in Hollywood,” Klowden said. “There’s a real concern about that level of competition, and what it means.”
Israeli forces have rounded up and arrested Palestinians en masse in the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem. The operation is being described as “collective punishment” after several Israeli soldiers were injured in an attack.
ANCHORAGE — The first presidential summit in years between Russia and the United States is on, setting nerves in Europe and Ukraine on a knife’s edge. But President Trump may have a surprise in store for Vladimir Putin.
Efforts to scuttle the high-stakes meeting have not been subtle. European officials issued statements in recent days on the futility of Trump negotiating with Putin over Ukraine without Ukraine, urging the U.S. president on Wednesday to not cut a unilateral deal. Kyiv warned that Moscow’s proposals for peace — rewarding its war of conquest with territorial concessions — are a nonstarter. Many Russia experts are hoping one side simply decides to call it off.
Despite their efforts, the summit — haphazardly scheduled on American soil with days to spare — is moving ahead, with Trump scheduled to host the Russian leader at a U.S. military base in Anchorage on Friday, the first meeting of its kind since 2021.
Experts fear Putin may be laying a trap for the Americans, manipulating Trump in private to solidify Russia’s position on the battlefield. But Trump suggested Wednesday that he would demand Putin agree to a ceasefire in Alaska.
“There will be very severe consequences” if he doesn’t, Trump told reporters.
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‘Very grave risk’
Hosting the meeting is an about-face from Trump, who over much of the summer appeared in the throes of a remarkable transformation on Putin, criticizing the Russian leader in harsh terms for the first time. To the relief and delight of Europe, Trump appeared to be losing his patience — embarrassed, even — at Putin’s open refusal to heed his calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine.
But Trump’s threats of a response, increasing sanctions against Russia and its trading partners, lasted only a matter of days.
On Aug. 6, the president’s special envoy on the crisis, Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor with no experience in diplomacy and no background in the region, was dispatched to Moscow. Planning for a summit began within hours of his departure from the Kremlin.
On Tuesday, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the summit would amount to a “listening session” for Trump on Putin’s interest in peace, battlefield reports emerged of a significant Russian breach in Ukrainian lines.
In a phone call, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Trump that Putin was “bluffing” on his commitments to peace, pressing ahead with an offensive to gain more territory. “There should be joint pressure on Russia, there should be sanctions — and there should be a message that if Russia doesn’t agree to a ceasefire in Alaska, this principle should work,” Zelensky said Wednesday.
“It sure looks like it’s moving in the wrong direction,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor in his first term, told The Times, dismissing Witkoff as a chief culprit behind what he fears is a coming diplomatic crisis: “Better send the Bobbsey twins.”
The perils of this meeting, Bolton said, lie in Putin’s skills as a manipulator. The Russian president may well convince Trump that his designs on Ukraine are reasonable — and the only way forward.
“There’s a very grave risk it does become an almost take-it-or-leave-it proposition for Zelensky,” Bolton said. On Wednesday morning, Trump criticized the media for being “very unfair” to him for quoting “fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton.”
Russia invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and its eastern regions in 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. Nearly a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in pursuit of Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest, according to independent analysts, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers adding to the casualty count.
“Clearly, Trump wants to sit down with the guy that he thinks is his friend again,” Bolton said. “And from Putin’s point of view, he doesn’t want any pesky Europeans around — and particularly not Zelensky. He wants to see if he can correct the damage he did.”
Echoes of Helsinki
President Trump shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin at 2018 Helsinki summit.
(Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)
Seven years ago, entering a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Trump set a similar bar for success as Leavitt has this week. “I don’t expect anything,” Trump said in an interview at the time from Scotland, before leaving for Helsinki. “I go in with very low expectations.”
On Air Force One en route to Helsinki, he cast himself as a dealmaker and tweeted that, “no matter how well I do at the Summit, if I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia,” it would still not be enough to earn him praise. He repeated the turn of phrase Wednesday morning in his post criticizing Bolton.
“If I got Moscow and Leningrad free,” Trump wrote, “as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!”
What resulted was a meeting and subsequent news conference that produced one ofthe most notorious moments of Trump’s first term. On the heels of calling the European Union a “foe” of the United States, Trump stood beside Putin and took his side over the U.S. intelligence community, disputing its assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Experts fear that a similar diplomatic rupture could unfold if Trump, deferential to Putin, emerges from their meeting Friday siding with the Russian leader over Ukraine in the war.
In recent days, Trump has said that a deal between the two sides would have to include land “swapping” — territorial concessions that are prohibited by the Ukrainian Constitution without a public vote of support — and that he would give Zelensky the “courtesy” of a call after his meeting with Putin, if all goes well.
“This will be the first U.S.-Russia summit brought about by sheer ignorance and incompetence: The U.S. president and his chosen envoy mistook a Russian demand for a concession,” said Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University.
“Ultimately, this is not a war about this or that piece of territory, but about whether Russia can establish political control over Ukraine, or whether Ukraine will remain free to choose its own domestic and international path,” Taylor said. “Trump’s false suggestion again that Zelensky is somehow at fault for Russia invading Ukraine indicates he still does not understand how we got here or what’s at stake.”
Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago who has been sentenced in absentia to 8½ years in prison in Russia for publishing information on a Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha, said that Trump’s attempts to negotiate away Ukrainian territory could be diplomatically disastrous — but will make little difference on the ground.
“This is not a very popular view, but I am not sure that the U.S. has that much leverage over President Zelensky to force him into major concessions,” Sonin said. “Many European countries would support Ukraine no matter what — even at the cost of their relationship with the U.S. With full withdrawal of the U.S. support, the catastrophic scenario, Ukraine will still be able to fight on.”
Pitfalls for both sides
Kremlinologists tend to believe Putin’s training as a KGB officer at the end of the Cold War gave him unique skills to navigate the world stage.
In Helsinki — as he had so often done with other world leaders, including the queen of England and the pope — Putin kept Trump waiting for half an hour, seen as a move to throw off the U.S. delegation leading up to the meeting.
Last week, in his meeting with Witkoff, the Russian president offered an Order of Lenin to a CIA official whose son died in Ukraine fighting for Russian forces.
Russia watchers fear that Friday will be no different. Already, Putin has secured a meeting with the U.S. president on his own terms.
“Whatever else you think about Putin, he’s an experienced and clever ruler who has successfully manipulated Trump in the past,” Taylor said. “Putin’s intransigence in rejecting Trump’s proposed ceasefire led not to the sanctions that Trump promised to apply last Friday, but an invitation to the United States for a summit at which the U.S. president has already signaled he will endorse territorial changes achieved through military conquest.”
But there may also be pitfalls in store for Putin, experts said.
Trump’s shift in tone on Putin since a NATO summit in The Hague in June suggests it is possible, if unlikely, that Trump is preparing to enter the meeting with a tougher stance. In recent months, the president has seen political benefit in catching world leaders off guard, berating Zelensky and South Africa’s leader in the Oval Office with cameras rolling.
At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, showered in praise by European leaders, Trump said in unusually clear terms that he was with the alliance “all the way.” Days later, he accused Putin of throwing “meaningless … bull—” at him and his team over the Ukraine war.
“I think there is some risk for Putin,” Sonin said. “He is not comfortable in any kind of adversarial situation — he quickly gets angry and defensive. And President Trump has the ability to put people in uncomfortable situations publicly. He has never done this to Putin before, but who knows.”
To Bolton, the best outcome of the summit would be that Putin fails to persuade Trump that he’s seriously interested in peace.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it’s possible,” Bolton said. “I think in the environment that they’ve got, one on one — only Russians and Americans present — that’s ideal for Putin to do his thing.”
“So he’s got what he wants,” Bolton added. “He’s on American soil, with no one else around.”
May 26 (UPI) — President Donald Trump will mark his first Memorial Day as commander-in-chief in his second term with ceremonies in Arlington National Cemetery.
“I will be making a Memorial Day Speech today at Arlington National Cemetery,” the president announced Monday morning on his social media platform, adding to “enjoy!!!”
Trump, who will take part in a wreath-laying ceremony per tradition at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, says the speech at the nation’s cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington in Virginia will be at 11 a.m. EDT.
“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds,” Trump wrote in all caps in part in an earlier post Monday morning.
In a separate statement, the White House said on “this solemn day” as the country honors the sacrifice of its fallen soldiers, Trump and first lady Melania Trump “ask all citizens to join us in prayer that Almighty God may comfort those who mourn, grant protection to all who serve, and bring blessed peace to the world.”
America’s first observance of Memorial Day on May 30, 1890, previously known as Decoration Day, was proclaimed by Union Commander John A. Logan to honor fallen soldiers who died fighting to preserve the Union during the Civil War.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the government estimates more than 650,000 Americans have died in battle since the Revolutionary War began in 1775.
On Monday, the VA will partner with nonprofits to honor veterans interred in national cemeteries where more than 5.4 million people are buried.
VA officials announced Thursday that through partnerships with Carry The Load, the Travis Manion Foundation and Victory for Veterans, at least 70,000 volunteers visit 54 national veterans cemeteries on Memorial Day.
It arrives on top of Trump’s revelation earlier this month that he plans to name November 11 — which is Veterans Day — a “national holiday” to celebrate past world war victories.
Outlawed Kurdish group the PKK, which has waged a 40-year insurgency against Turkey, has announced it is laying down its arms and disbanding.
The move followed a call in February by the group’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, for the organisation to disband. The group is banned as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU, UK and US.
The PKK insurgency initially aimed to create an independent homeland for Kurds, who account for about 20% of Turkey’s population. But it has since moved away from its separatist goals, focusing instead on more autonomy and greater Kurdish rights.
More than 40,000 people have been killed during the conflict.
In February, Ocalan, 76, called on his movement to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. The PKK leader has been in solitary confinement in prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara, south-west of Istanbul, since 1999.
Ocalan wrote a letter from prison in February saying “there is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system. Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.”
It is unclear what Ocalan and his supporters will get in return for disbanding but there is speculation that he may be paroled.
Kurdish politicians will be hoping for a new political dialogue, and a pathway towards greater Kurdish rights.
Both sides had reasons to do a deal now.
The PKK has been hit hard by the Turkish military in recent years, and regional changes have made it harder for them and their affiliates to operate in Iraq and Syria.
President Erdogan needs the support of pro Kurdish political parties if he is to be able to run again in Turkey’s next presidential election, due in 2028.
The decision to disband was an important step towards a “terror-free Turkey”, and the process would be monitored by state institutions, a spokesperson for President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party said, according to Reuters news agency.
Winthrop Rodgers, from the international affairs think tank Chatham House, said it would take “a major democratic transition by Turkey” to accommodate demands from Kurdish political parties.
There has been “some goodwill” from some Turkish leaders in recent months, Rodgers said, which allowed the PKK disbandment to play out.
He added: “But whether that extends to the major changes needed to ensure full Kurdish participation in politics and society is far less clear.
“In a lot of ways, the ball is in Turkey’s court.”
