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Hard Numbers: BP cuts thousands of jobs, UK drug seizures soar, Astronauts take a hike, Nigeria kills dozens of jihadists

January 16, 2025
Alex Kliment
​A man walks past a Jio-bp fuel tanker, an Indian fuel and mobility joint venture between Reliance Industries (RIL) and British Petroleum (bp), in Navi Mumbai, India, October 26, 2021
A man walks past a Jio-bp fuel tanker, an Indian fuel and mobility joint venture between Reliance Industries (RIL) and British Petroleum (bp), in Navi Mumbai, India, October 26, 2021
REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas

5: Energy giant BP announced Thursday it would cut 4,700 employees and 3,000 contractors, a total of more than 5% of its global workforce. The move is part of a broader strategy that aims to bring down costs by $2 billion over the next two years.

3.66 billion:Drugs is big business, innit. In the year ending March 2024, UK authorities seized a record 119 tons of illegal narcotics, with a street value of $3.66 billion. About two-thirds of the haul was cannabis, and a fifth was cocaine. Elsewhere in Europe, drug interdictions have also surged – a massive Interpol operation last spring led to the seizure of more than 600 tons of narcotics or precursor chemicals. The UN says cocaine consumption in European cities has risen 80% since 2011.

7: If you’ve got cabin fever, go for a walk – if you’ve got space station fever, go for a spacewalk! That’s what US astronaut Suni Williams did Thursday, stepping out of the International Space Station for the first time since arriving more than seven months ago. Williams and her colleague Butch Wilmore were supposed to be at the station for only a week, but spacecraft trouble has kept them stranded in space, where they’ll likely remain until April or May.

76: In recent weeks, Nigerian forces have killed 76 jihadists in the country’s northeastern state of Borno. The militants belonged either to Boko Haram or to Islamic State West Africa, whose jihadist insurgency against the Nigerian government has displaced more than 2 million people and killed as many as 30,000 since it began in 2009. Growing violence and extremism in the Sahel region (which includes Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Chad) remains one of Africa’s biggest security challenges.

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