Ex-Honduran top cop sentenced to 19 years in US; Intel says it will slash workforce to cut costs
NEW YORK—The former police chief of Honduras was sentenced to 19 years in prison on Thursday for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, US officials said. Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, 64, was arrested by US law enforcement as part of an investigation that implicated former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in prison in June for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US. Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Bonilla “abused his official positions and rose to power by facilitating cocaine trafficking on a massive scale.” Bonilla used “violence, including murder, to protect ton-quantities of cocaine headed for the United States, for the benefit and at the behest of his powerful drug trafficking and political partners,” Williams added.
According to US prosecutors, Hernandez turned the Central American country into a “narco-state” during his 2014 to 2022 presidency. He was convicted in March of having facilitated the smuggling of hundreds of tons of cocaine—mainly from Colombia and Venezuela—to the United States via Honduras since 2004, starting long before he became president. —AFP
Intel says it will slash workforce to cut costs
SAN FRANCISCO—US chip maker Intel said on Thursday it will slash more than 15 percent of its workforce as it streamlines operations. The plan to cut approximately $20 billion in expenses this year came as Intel reported a loss of $1.6 billion in the recently ended quarter.
“Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones,” Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger said in an earnings release. “Second-half trends are more challenging than we previously expected.” Second quarter earnings were negatively affected by “headwinds” to the ramp-up of Intel’s artificial intelligence PC product and unused capacity at its facilities, according to chief financial officer David Zinsner.
“By implementing our spending reductions, we are taking proactive steps to improve our profits and strengthen our balance sheet,” Zinsner said. Intel reported having 124,800 employees at the end of last year, meaning the layoffs could hit about 18,000 positions. In June, Intel announced it was halting the expansion of a major factory project in Israel, which was going to pump an extra $15 billion towards a chip plant.
For decades, Intel has dominated the market for the chips that run everything from laptops to data centers. But in recent years, its competitors—especially Nvidia—have soared ahead on specialized AI processors. —AFP
Indonesia bans search engine over gambling, porn
JAKARTA—Indonesia said it has banned the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, citing concerns that it could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites which are illegal in the country, the communications ministry said on Friday.
Indonesia, with the world’s biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene. Social media platform Reddit and video-hosting platform Vimeo are blocked. Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official, told Reuters that DuckDuckGo had been blocked “because of the many complaints made to us about the rampant online gambling and pornography content in its search results.”
Pennsylvania-based and privately owned DuckDuckGo did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside normal US business hours. Though illegal, government data showed 3 million Indonesians went online to gamble last year, spending an estimated $20 billion, or about 1.5 percent of gross domestic product. —Reuters
