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Paratransit provider to lay off 61 workers in Springfield

Diamond Transportation Services plans to lay off 61 workers in by the end of the month, according to a letter sent to the state Nov. 7.

The company, which provides shared-ride services for passengers with disabilities that prevent them from using bus or rail, said the are a result of the Washington Metropolitan Area Authority () reducing the number of bus routes the company manages, according to a letter sent to the Virginia Department of Development and Advancement, or , in compliance with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

“As a result, Diamond will no longer provide bus transportation service on those routes and must eliminate the affected positions,” the letter said.

operates as part of the WeDriveU brand, which is part of England-based Mobico Group, an international transport provider.

WMATA and WeDriveU did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the letter, Diamond Transportation Services noted that it plans to close a location in Capitol Heights, Maryland. Employees at a facility in Landover, Maryland, will also face layoffs. A Nov. 10 notice to Maryland from Diamond Transportation Services reports that 182 employees in that state will lose their jobs.

Diamond Transportation Services said in the letter that it was not able to provide the requisite 60-day notice “because our client’s decision to reduce the number of bus routes we manage was sudden and outside our control.” WMATA notified the company of the route reduction on Oct. 31, according to the .

Of the 61 employees who will lose their jobs, 54 are drivers. All but one of the affected positions are under a collective bargaining agreement with either the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 or the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 639. Those employees do have bumping rights under certain circumstances, the WARN notice stated. One operations manager who is being laid off is not represented by a union and does not have bumping rights.

Robert Werth founded Diamond Transportation Services in the mid-1980s. In 2016, National Express Transit — a subsidiary of Mobico Group being rebranded under WeDriveU — bought the company, which at the time had 270 employees and 151 vehicles providing paratransit and shuttle service to the Greater Washington, D.C., area.

Amazon buys 189 acres in Prince William tech park for $700M

Amazon Data Services has bought approximately 188.5 acres in for a whopping $700 million.

The e-tailer’s arm bought the land within the 270-acre Devlin Technology Park, located at the northwest corner of Devlin and Linton Hall roads in Bristow. The purchase from Reston-based homebuilder Stanley Martin Homes closed on Nov. 5. The land’s assessed value was approximately $115 million.

The Devlin Technology Park zoning stipulates a maximum floor area ratio that would allow for 3.5 million square feet of data center space or use.

After a lengthy meeting in November 2023, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 5-3 to rezone the land in Devlin Technology Park to light industrial, allowing data center development. The rezoning also added the park to the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, which includes land held by Google and .

Stanley Martin Homes bought the land that would become Devlin Tech Park in 2021 and 2022, purchasing the property at 8900 Devlin Road for more than $21.13 million and the properties at 9000 Devlin Road and 12615 Fog Light Way for $30.16 million.

New York-based investment bank Eastdil Secured was the adviser to Stanley Martin in the early November transaction.

did not return a request for comment.

Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia in cloud infrastructure deal

Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker as part of a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from ‘s Azure cloud computing platform.

As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.

The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.

“This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers,” Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the “critical” partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and made the technology behind ChatGPT the foundation for its own AI assistant, Copilot. But the two companies moved farther apart and their business agreements were amended as OpenAI increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other developers and chipmakers.

Asked in September if OpenAI could do more with those new computing partnerships than it could with Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Associated Press his company was “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

At the same time, Microsoft holds a roughly 27% stake in the new for-profit corporation that OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, is forming to advance its commercial ambitions as the world’s most valuable startup.

Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available to customers of the three biggest cloud computing providers: , which remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Google and Microsoft.

AI products like Claude and ChatGPT take huge amounts of energy and computing power to build and operate, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is yet turning a profit. As part of the deal, Nvidia said Anthropic will have access to up to a gigawatt of capacity from its specialized AI chips.

Huang said he’s “admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”

Cloudflare resolves outage that impacted thousands, ChatGPT, X and more

A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, “League of Legends,” to the New Jersey system early Tuesday.

At 12:44 p.m. EST, said its engineers no longer saw some of the issues plaguing its customers, but that they were continuing to monitor for any further problems.

Others platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, , , , and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.

New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load. And New York City Emergency Management said there are reports city services being impacted by the outage. The city is continuing to monitor for disruptions.

In France, national railway company SNCF’s website has been affected. The company warned customers that “some information and schedules may not be available or up to date. Our teams are working to restore these services as quickly as possible.”

Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up “it results in massive digital gridlock” for internet users, cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said.

While most people think there’s a direct line between their digital device and a website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sits in the middle of those connections, he said.

Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20% of the world’s websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site,” Chapple said. “Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home. That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20% of the internet goes down at the same time.”

Last month had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.

And experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

Virginia casinos report $82M in October revenue

October gaming revenues for Virginia’s three casinos totaled $82.1 million, according to data the released Nov. 14.

Opened in December 2024, Virginia’s newest permanent casino, Caesars Virginia in , reported the largest adjusted gaming revenue (wagers minus winnings) for the month: approximately $33.6 million. Of that, approximately $23.3 million came from its 1,478 slots, and the remaining roughly $10.3 million came from its 100 table games.

, which opened as Virginia’s first permanent casino in January 2023, generated $19.5 million from its 1,426 slots and $7.8 million from its 84 table games, for a total AGR of nearly $27.3 million in October.

Last month, the reported more than $21.18 million in AGR, with nearly $17.75 million of that coming from its 1,372 slots and about $3.44 million coming from its 73 table games. The casino’s temporary facility opened in July 2022, making it the first operating casino in Virginia. The permanent opened in November 2024.

October’s AGR is up about 11% from September’s AGR of $73.08 million and up 30.5% year-over-year.

Virginia assesses a graduated tax on a casino’s adjusted gaming revenue. For the month of October, taxes from casino AGRs totaled almost $18.44 million.

Under Virginia law, 6% of a casino operator’s AGR goes to its host locality until the operator passes $200 million in AGR for the year, at which point the host locality’s tax rate rises to 7%. If an operator passes $400 million in AGR in the calendar year, that rises to 8%.

For October, Danville received 7% of Caesars Virginia’s AGR, amounting to $2.35 million. Portsmouth received 7% of the ‘s AGR, netting $1.9 million. For the Bristol casino, 7% of its adjusted gaming revenue — more than $1.39 million last month — goes to the Regional Improvement Commission, which the General Assembly established to distribute Bristol casino tax funds throughout Southwest Virginia.

The Problem Gambling Treatment and Support Fund receives 0.8% of total taxes — approximately $147,491 last month. The Family and Children’s Trust Fund, which funds family violence prevention and treatment programs, receives 0.2% of the monthly total, which was approximately $36,873 in October. The remaining $12.59 million in taxes goes to the state’s Gaming Proceeds Fund.

Two more casinos are on the horizon in Virginia.

Construction began in February on the long-awaited $750 million Norfolk casino from development partners Boyd Gaming and the Pamunkey Indian Tribe. A temporary Norfolk casino, The , opened earlier this month. The permanent casino is anticipated to open in 2027.

And in Petersburg, Baltimore-based The Cordish Cos. and Virginia Beach developer Bruce Smith Enterprise broke ground in March on the $1.4 billion Live! Casino & Hotel Virginia, slated to open in 2027. A temporary Petersburg casino is expected to open in January 2026.

Amazon closing Sterling facility, affecting 247 workers

Amazon.com plans to shut down a in at the end of January 2026, impacting 247 employees, according to a letter sent to the state last week.

‘s Nov. 14 letter to the Virginia Department of Development and Advancement, or , says that employees were made aware of the decision to close the facility at 45121 Global Plaza in May, and that internal transfers are available to all affected workers.

As of Monday, about 125 employees have accepted transfers to other Amazon facilities, spokesperson Amber Plunkett said, and others are in the pipeline. She said that workers at the Sterling facility were eligible for jobs at other delivery and fulfillment centers, and some of the 125 employees went through Amazon’s “upskilling” program to qualify for new positions at .

Those who don’t accept transfers will receive severance packages, she added.

Because of changes to Amazon’s delivery network, including the addition of more delivery and fulfillment centers in recent years, the company decided not to renew its lease, Plunkett said.

The building is owned by an entity connected to Prologis, a investment trust based in San Francisco. According to , Prologis owns more than 4.2 million square feet across 50 buildings in the county.

Amazon has 14 fulfillment centers and 16 delivery stations across the state.

“We’re continuously enhancing our network to better serve our business needs and create an even better experience for our employees, customers, and partners. As we evolve our operations, we’re transitioning away from our Sterling fulfillment center while continuing to grow our significant presence across Northern Virginia,” Plunkett said in a statement.

Nexus Services exec sentenced to 6.5 years for employment tax fraud

An executive of Virginia-based bonding company was sentenced to 80 months in federal prison for employment tax Thursday.

Richard Moore, executive vice president and part owner of the Verona-based company that provided bond securitization to immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pleaded guilty in January to two counts related to not accounting for and paying employment .

Moore, who lived in Augusta County, withheld funds for employment taxes to the IRS but did not give the money to the government between 2015 and 2024, according to the U.S. .

In total, Moore caused a tax loss of about $3.1 million, the federal government stated.

Moore spent millions of dollars of Nexus funds on himself, according to court documents. His purchases included more than $500,000 on luxury cars, including three Ferraris, three Maseratis, two BMWs and a Mercedes-Benz. He shelled out more than $573,000 on his August 2016 wedding. He also paid more than $1.2 million to write, publish and publicize a book written by his spouse.

U.S. District Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon for the Western District of Virginia also ordered Moore to serve three years under supervised release and to pay more than $3 million in restitution to the United States.

Moore faced a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison for each count. Originally, Moore was indicted on 10 counts of tax fraud.

In October, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld an $881 million judgement against , its parent company, Nexus Services, and its principals, Moore, Michael Donovan and Evan Ajin, for deceit and abuse of immigrant consumers. Of that, more than $555 million goes to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; about $13.9 million to New York; about $3.4 million to Massachusetts and $7.1 million to Virginia for penalties. Another $231 million goes to restitution to affected consumers.

 

Stocks fall as Nvidia slips and market pulls back

Summary

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. is sinking on Monday as Nvidia and other superstars created by the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology dim some more.

The S&P 500 fell 1.1% and pulled further from its all-time high set late last month. The Industrial Average was down 544 points, or 1.2%, as of 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.1% lower.

Nvidia was again the heaviest weight on the market, as it’s often been in its last couple of tumultuous weeks. The chip company fell 2.9%, while losses for other AI winners included a 3.2% fall for Palantir Technologies and 6.8% slide for Super Micro Computer.

Critics have been warning that the U.S. stock market could be primed for a drop because of how high prices have shot since April, leaving them looking too expensive. Critics point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.

Even with Monday’s loss, Nvidia is still up nearly 38% for the year so far after it doubled in price in four of the last five years. Over the last two weeks, the worries about a potentially too-high price have sent it swinging by at least 1.8% in eight of the last 10 days, up or down.

That has Wall Street’s spotlight on Wednesday, when Nvidia will report how much profit it made during the summer. AI stocks have surged as much as they have because of expectations that they’ll produce huge growth in profits. If they fail to top analysts’ expectations, that would undercut one of the big assumptions that’s driven the U.S. stock market to records.

Such high expectations extend beyond tech stocks, even if they are toughest for AI darlings.

Aramark fell 4.4% after the company reported a profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. The company, which offers food and facilities management for schools, national parks and convention centers, also said it expects an underlying measure of profit to grow between 20% and 25% this upcoming year. While relatively strong, that was less than what analysts had been forecasting.

That helped offset a rise of 2.9% for Alphabet. It jumped after Berkshire Hathaway said it built a $4.34 billion ownership stake in Google’s parent company. Berkshire Hathaway, run by famed investor Warren Buffett, is notorious for trying to buy stocks only when they look like good values while avoiding anything that looks too expensive.

Another source of potential disappointment for Wall Street is what the  does with interest rates. The expectation had been that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates in hopes of shoring up the slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give a boost to the economy and to prices for investments.

But questions are rising about whether a third cut for the year will come out of the Fed’s next meeting in December, something that traders had earlier seen as very likely. The downside of lower interest rates is that they can make inflation worse, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Fed’s 2% target.

Fed officials have also pointed to the U.S. government’s shutdown, which delayed the release of updates on the job market and other signals about the economy. With less information and less certainty about how things are going, some Fed officials have suggested it may be better just to wait in December to get more clarity.

Now that the shutdown is over, the government is preparing to release September’s delayed jobs report on Thursday. That could create further swings for the market. Data that’s very strong would likely stay the Fed’s hand on rate cuts, while figures that are very weak would raise worries about the economy.

In 2026, the Fed is likely to cut interest rates only in response to a slowing economy instead of trying to cut ahead of it, according to Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel. That’s not as good an environment for stock prices, and Bannister said the “Fed’s ‘free lunch’ is over.”

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.12% from 4.14% late Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly across much of Europe and Asia.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 1.8% annual pace in the July-September quarter.

South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% as tech-related stocks there did well.

Fed’s Lisa Cook disputes mortgage fraud allegations

Summary

  • Fed Gov. disputes allegations used by Trump to justify firing her.
  • Attorney says accusations rely on isolated, innocuous document notations.
  • allowed Cook to remain while her removal case proceeds.
  • Pulte accused Cook of listing multiple primary residences but not Republicans in similar cases.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a letter to Attorney General Pam Biondi on Monday, lawyers for Governor Lisa Cook disputed allegations by a Trump administration official that she committed mortgage .

President used the accusation as a basis to seek her firing, the first time a president has sought to remove a Fed governor in the central bank’s 112-year history.

The letter is the first response by Cook to a criminal referral in August by , director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte has made several other mortgage fraud accusations, including against leading Democrats such as New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and California Rep. Eric Swalwell.

The attempted firing occurred as Trump has repeatedly attacked the Fed for not cutting its key interest rate quickly enough. If Cook is ultimately removed from her position, it would give the president the opportunity to appoint a fourth member to the Fed’s seven-member board, securing a majority.

Cook sued to keep her job, and the Supreme Court ruled last month that she could remain in the position while she fights the administration in court. The Supreme Court has said it would hear arguments in the case in January.

In the letter Monday, Cook’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote that the case against her largely rests on “one stray reference” in a 2021 mortgage document that was “plainly innocuous in light of the several other truthful and more specific disclosures” about the homes she has purchased.

“There is no fraud, no intent to deceive, nothing whatsoever criminal or remotely a basis to allege mortgage fraud,” the letter said.

Cook is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s governing board, and was appointed in 2022 by President Joe Biden.

The Justice Department and did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

In August, Pulte accused Cook of committing mortgage fraud by declaring two different homes — one in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the other in Atlanta — as her “primary residence.” Such declarations can result in lower mortgage rates or a smaller down payment requirement than if a property is declared to be a second or vacation home.

“Do not declare two principal residences in President Trump’s America,” Pulte said Aug. 20 on social media platform X. “Mortgage fraud is a serious and must be prosecuted as such.”

Yet Lowell said Monday that Pulte has pursued mortgage fraud on a partisan basis, focusing on Democrats and refusing to pursue similar allegations against Republicans.

Pulte made a criminal referral to the Justice Department in August, and followed up with a second referral on a third property in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pulte alleged that Cook also classified that property as a primary residence, even though she rented it out.

Lowell argued that Cook has mostly lived in the Ann Arbor property since first purchasing it in 2005. As a result, it was accurate for her to refer to it as her “primary residence” in a June 2021 application to refinance its mortgage, the letter said.

A month later she purchased a condominium in Atlanta, and in a July 2021 document also referred to it as her “primary residence.” Lowell said that it was an “isolated notation” that did not reflect an intent to defraud. An earlier mortgage application to the same lender in May 2021 had referred to the Atlanta condo as a “vacation home,” Lowell said. Cook also referred to it as a second home in federal filings during her confirmation process to become a Fed governor.

“It would be impossible to conclude that she intended to defraud the lender by inadvertently listing the property as her ‘Primary Residence,’” the letter said.

Lowell wrote that there was similarly no fraud involved in the Cambridge home, which she obtained while working as an economist for Harvard University.

Cook worked for the school for roughly five years when she bought the home in 2002 and obtained a mortgage that listed it as her primary residence. It remained her primary residence until she was hired as a tenure-track academic by Michigan State University and moved, Lowell said. She refinanced the Cambridge property in 2021 and redesignated it as a second-home, according to mortgage documents provided by Lowell.

On financial filings submitted to the government in connection with her nomination to the Fed, Cook also disclosed the home as a rental property and second home, the letter said.

“Once again, Director Pulte offers no evidence indicating that Governor Cook had the ‘required specific intent to defraud’ in relation to the Cambridge property,” Lowell wrote. “On the contrary, when Governor Cook refinanced the Cambridge property, she updated the mortgage to reflect that it was no longer her primary residence.”

Pulte has shown little appetite to investigate similar allegations of mortgage misconduct by members of Trump’s administration, allies of the president and even Pulte’s own father, which Cook’s attorney noted.

“One would expect that he would have made referrals to you based on the same types of documents about others,” Lowell wrote.

Though the White House has repeatedly defended Pulte, over the past month he also found himself the subject of unwanted scrutiny – and has angered other members of the administration. Earlier this month, he persuaded Trump about the allure of a 50-year mortgage as a way to increase home buying and building — a proposal that was widely criticized because it would drastically increase the overall price of a loan.

Pulte, who appointed himself chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has also rattle the housing industry by purging ethics officials and top leaders of the two government-sponsored lending giants, which hold trillions of dollars in assets.

Other top executives at Fannie Mae were forced out last month after they voiced alarm that a Pulte confidant had shared confidential pricing data with Freddie Mac, a top competitor.

The data sharing exposed the company to claims that it was colluding with a rival to fix mortgage rates, the AP reported last week.

Brazil says U.S. tariffs stay high on coffee, beef

Summary

  • says on coffee, beef and tropical fruits remain at 40%.
  • Trump removed earlier 10% levies but kept the additional 40% imposed in July.
  • Some products, like orange juice, now face zero tariffs.
  • Officials say U.S.–Brazil have improved after recent meetings.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian Vice President Geraldo Alckmin said Saturday that Brazilian exported goods to the U.S. including coffee, beef and tropical fruits would still be tariffed 40%, despite President ‘s decision to remove some import .

In a dramatic move on Friday, Trump scrapped levies announced in April on what he called ‘Liberation Day’ in hopes of encouraging domestic production and lifting the U.S. economy. Brazil at the time was hit with a 10% tariff.

But in July, Trump imposed a further 40% tariff, citing — among other reasons — the trial of his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, which he called a “witch hunt.” Proceedings went ahead regardless and in September Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison for attempting a coup.

Alckmin said some products, such as orange juice, would now have a zero tariff as they were not targeted by the additional 40%. But that extra tariff remains in place on products including coffee, beef and tropical fruits, such as mangos and pineapples.

While Brazil’s vice president welcomed Trump’s latest decision, which he called “positive” and a “step in the right direction,” he said there remained a “distortion that needs to be corrected.”

“Everyone got 10% less, but in Brazil’s case, which had 50%, we ended up with 40%, which is very high,” Alckmin told journalists in the capital Brasilia.

Alckmin said that Friday’s decision means that 26% of Brazilian goods are now entering the U.S. without additional tariffs. That’s up from 23%.

Trump’s July decision, which was overtly political as Brazil has a trade deficit with the United States, led to the worst U.S.-Brazil relations in history.

Those relations have since improved, and in October Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Trump met in Malaysia.

“President Lula’s conversation with President Donald Trump was important in terms of dialogue and negotiation,” Alckmin said on Saturday.

After that encounter, Lula said he was confident the two countries would soon reach a trade deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira met for 50 minutes this week to further the conversation.

The Trump administration has insisted that its tariffs helped fill government coffers and weren’t a major factor in higher prices at grocery stores around the country. But Democrats were quick to paint Friday’s move as an acknowledgment that Trump’s policies were hurting American pocketbooks.

Record-high beef prices have been a particular concern, and Trump had said he intended to take action to try and lower them. Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, a major beef exporter, had been a factor.

Back in Brazil, the Brazilian Association of the Coffee Industry said it would continue to monitor the situation.

“(We) will keep working to ensure certainty, competitiveness, and predictability for the Brazilian coffee industry,” the group’s president, Pavel Cardoso, said in a statement.