Dior has agreed a number of remedies to settle an Italian competition authority investigation into whether the luxury brand and two of its units misled consumers with their statements about working conditions at its suppliers. The antitrust body said Wednesday that the pledges made by Dior, which is owned by LVMH, were an appropriate remedy for the possible unlawfulness and decided to close the investigation “without establishing any infringement.” Dior’s commitments include paying €2 million ($2.3 million) over five years to support initiatives aimed at helping victims of labor exploitation. Last year prosecutors in Milan uncovered workshops where underpaid workers, often immigrants who were in the country illegally, produced leather bags then sold to Dior and Armani for a tiny fraction of their retail price. This led Italy’s antitrust investigation to open an investigation into whether the luxury brands had misled consumers, focusing on the discrepancies between the reality uncovered by the judicial labor probes and the messages from brands to consumers in terms of craftsmanship and corporate social responsibility. Among the remedies, Dior also committed to making changes to its ethical and social responsibility statements and to adopting stricter procedures to select and monitor suppliers, the authority said Wednesday. In a separate statement, the company said: “Dior partnered closely with the Authority to define a robust set of commitments that increase transparency and strengthen oversight throughout its supply chain.” Italian consumer group Codacons said the investigation’s outcome was too lenient, given the small size of the financial commitments and the fact that no fine was handed down. Last year prosecutors appointed commissioners to oversee Dior and Armani’s units that outsourced the handbag production, to ensure they fix their supply chain problems. The special administration regime was lifted earlier this year. Last week, an Italian court placed a unit of fashion brand Valentino under judicial administration for a year after uncovering worker abuse inside its supply chain.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he soon planned to decide whether to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entities that help provide stability and affordability to America’s home mortgage market. “I am giving very serious consideration to bringing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public,” Trump posted on his social media website, Truth Social, on Wednesday, saying he would consult with cabinet members and make a decision “in the near future.” “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing very well, throwing off a lot of CASH, and the time would seem to be right,” the post said. But at a time when mortgage rates remain stubbornly high and home prices keep climbing, some economists have warned that attempts at privatizing Fannie and Freddie could upset the balance in the mortgage market, making it even more expensive for Americans to borrow money to purchase a home. Many of Trump’s allies in the Republican Party have long advocated for ending the government conservatorship that Fannie and Freddie were placed under after their role in the 2008 global financial crisis. Government control of the two entities was intended to be temporary. In fact, Trump attempted to untangle Fannie and Freddie from US government control in 2019 during his first administration and failed. Fannie and Freddie essentially grease the wheels of America’s home lending market by buying mortgages from lenders and repackaging them for investors. This helps enable a reliable flow of money, allowing mortgage lenders to offer more affordable mortgage rates to would-be homebuyers. Many experts credit the two entities with helping to prop up the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most popular type of home loan in the US due to its relatively low monthly payments compared to shorter-term loans. Before 2008, Fannie and Freddie were private companies, backed by the US Treasury – though both were originally created by the government. They were placed under government control on September 7, 2008, after facing massive losses amid crashing home values that ignited the Great Recession. A week later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, sparking a global financial crisis. Privatizing Fannie and Freddie could spook the investors who buy up mortgage loans, leading them to demand a higher return for their investments and pushing up mortgage rates, experts warn. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated in 2024 that privatization could cost the typical American taking out a new mortgage between $1,800 and $2,800 per year. Fannie and Freddie are currently controlled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which has been run by William Pulte since his confirmation in March. At that time, Pulte told CNN that any effort to privatize Fannie and Freddie would need to include “significant study” on what the effort might do to mortgage rates. That may take a few years. In a note to clients on Wednesday, TD Cowen financial services and housing policy analyst Jaret Seiberg said he did not expect the Trump administration to attempt a spin-off until late 2026 or early 2027.

Sometimes the arguments could be heard well down the hall. The topic was “60 Minutes,” and the tension was audible. CBS News chief Wendy McMahon was clashing with her bosses over upcoming stories on the newsmagazine — in part because President Trump’s legally dubious lawsuit against CBS meant that billions of dollars were at risk. “Wendy was standing up for us,” a veteran CBS journalist said. “There’s a lot of fear about what happens with her gone now.” McMahon stepped down on Monday, under pressure from CBS parent Paramount Global, intensifying the impression that CBS News is in distress due to Trump’s political pressure and other business factors. While CBS journalists are doing their jobs and covering the Trump administration assertively, Paramount lawyers are trying to strike a settlement with Trump, perhaps believing that such a deal will help secure the administration’s approval of a pending merger. With the Trump tug-of-war on everyone’s minds, getting and keeping “60 Minutes” on the air this spring was a week-by-week challenge, according to people at the network. McMahon repeatedly defended the program in conversations with Paramount Global co-CEO George Cheeks, who himself was under pressure from controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. While some of the internal battles have been previously reported, five sources who spoke with CNN on condition of anonymity said the fights were much more fraught than the viewing public realizes. There was one hint about it on-air, last month, after “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned, citing a loss of independence. “No one here is happy about it,” correspondent Scott Pelley said of the interference Owens had sensed. The alleged corporate meddling began several months earlier. One of the disputes was over CBS News coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Redstone, a strong supporter of Israel and Jewish causes, lodged objections over what she sensed was biased coverage of the conflict. For a newsmagazine like “60 Minutes” with a long, proud tradition of independence, Redstone’s involvement was deeply troubling. One of her chief complaints was about a January “60 Minutes” segment that highlighted America’s support for Israel’s bombing of Gaza. McMahon mediated the conflict over that report, as well as multiple disputes over “60 Minutes” reports about Trump’s return to office and the impact of his administration’s policy changes. It was clear, the five sources said, that Paramount was primarily concerned about how the tough Trump coverage would impact the lawsuit and settlement talks. (The New York Times reported Monday that Trump’s team threatened to file another lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” segment on Trump targeting big law firms.) One of the people involved said McMahon played the role of educator, or at least tried to, “explaining the importance of journalistic independence” to Paramount leadership. There is a long history of news division chiefs serving as firewalls between a corporate parent and a newsroom. The big difference in this case is the Trump lawsuit over last October’s “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed was deliberately mis-edited at the behest of the Democratic campaign. Legal experts have derided the lawsuit as frivolous and laughable, and CBS defended the newsmagazine and its editorial judgment on First Amendment grounds. A full transcript of the Harris interview only further confirmed that “60 Minutes” engaged in normal editing processes. However, the suit posed a very serious problem for Redstone, who struck a merger deal with Skydance Media in mid-2024. That deal is now awaiting Trump administration approval. Redstone has pushed to settle the lawsuit, despite the widely held assessment that CBS lawyers would prevail against Trump in court. In a letter to Redstone that was made public on Tuesday, three Democratic senators questioned whether Paramount is in danger of violating bribery laws. That question has also come up inside CBS News. At “60 Minutes,” “everyone thinks this lawsuit is an act of extortion, everyone,” a network correspondent told CNN. The far-flung “60 Minutes” staff — while rarely all together at the network’s midtown Manhattan headquarters — is united in confidence that the program did nothing wrong, despite Trump’s wild allegations about the Harris interview. But there is also a widespread sense of resignation that the Trump settlement will happen, one way or another. Citing a source close to the negotiations, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that Paramount could pay Trump as much as $30 to 50 million. McMahon and Owens told colleagues that they would not apologize to Trump as a part of any settlement, so their departures may portend an imminent deal. McMahon had detractors in and around CBS, too, and those people have pointed to other reasons for her exit. The news division’s recent reformatting of the “CBS Evening News” is widely thought to be a misfire, for instance, and the newscast will likely be retooled — again — once McMahon is out of the picture. But “despite all her miscalculations, she was viewed as the last thing standing between us and Redstone,” one of the sources said. When Owens stepped down, CBS journalists feared that in-the-works “60 Minutes” segments about Trump could be quashed. Journalists talked with each other about how to preserve the material. According to several sources, McMahon worked behind the scenes to protect the reports. McMahon, Cheeks and Redstone have not commented about the “60 Minutes” disputes. Ultimately, the newsmagazine’s reputation has been protected. Week after week, CBS has broadcast substantive investigations about Trump and other subjects. Ahead of the newsmagazine’s traditional mid-May season finale, a scheduled report about Trump’s planned cutbacks to the IRS was held back, but for sound journalistic reasons, according to the network. A CBS spokesperson said that “the roughly 7,000 probationary employees who were dismissed from their jobs” at the IRS were being called back to work, thus changing the segment altogether. “Our team will continue to report on these new details and will broadcast the story in the future,” CBS said. With McMahon exiting, her recently named No. 2, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, will now report directly to Cheeks. CBS journalists said they are hopeful that Cibrowski, an award-winning journalist and executive, will act as a heat shield with Paramount — and Skydance, assuming the merger is approved.

Epic Games’ wildly popular multiplayer shooter game “Fortnite” was available again on Apple’s app store in the US on Tuesday, capping a ban of nearly five years and marking a major win for the video company. The video game title was also available on the Epic Games Store and AltStore in the European Union, Fortnite said in a post on social media platform X. Apple had banned Fortnite from its store in 2020, and while the iPhone maker allowed the game back last year in the European Union following pressure from authorities, the app store on iPhones and iPads in the US still did not carry the game. Fortnite launched in 2017 and became an instant hit, drawing millions of players around the world thanks to its last-player-standing, “battle royale” format. At the time of the ban, Epic had 116 million users just on Apple’s platform.

There is a “first of its kind” crypto bill making progress through the Senate that you’re going to be tempted to snooze on because a) it’s about “stablecoins,” which is a subcategory of crypto – a parallel financial system almost no one understands, and b) opponents are focusing their criticism on corruption, which may be accurate but perhaps you’re tired of reading all the news about the Trump family’s alleged use of the power of the presidency to make a profit? (ICYMI: see here, here, here and here.) But there’s a big planting-seeds-for-the-next-financial-crisis kind of reason why you should understand what this bill is. So let’s get into it. Some key background The crypto industry-backed bill is called GENIUS, or “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins.” Stablecoins are a digital asset designed to maintain a 1-to-1 peg with the dollar (or other traditional, “stable” currency). One stablecoin should always equal one dollar, forever and ever. They are essentially a way for crypto investors to keep their cash in the crypto universe, where tokens like bitcoin and ether and solana tend to swing wildly in value. They aren’t nearly as well known as bitcoin, the biggest crypto by market value. But in terms of trading volume, stablecoins are by far the biggest players. What’s in the bill (in English)? The crypto industry wants the Genius bill because it would lay down, for the first time in the industry’s 16-year history, rules of the road for a key sector of their business. Which, of course, encourages greater adoption of crypto and thus makes them more money. The bill would require stablecoins to, among other things, hold reserves of safe, liquid assets like US dollars and Treasury bills, and publicly disclose those holdings monthly. It would also place some light restrictions on publicly traded companies that want to issue their own stablecoins (more on that in a moment). But “the bill is light on consumer safeguards and limitations to corporations’ ability to issue their own stablecoins,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor of international trade and the author of the 2021 book “The Future of Money.” “Moreover, the Trump administration’s boosterism of crypto and light-touch approach to regulation suggests that any such safeguards and limitations will not be enforced with much force,” Prasad added. What’s the issue? Well. There’s the potential for corruption, as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other critics have been shouting from the rafters. In fact, Democrats initially refused to vote for the bill in part because of Trump’s out-in-the-open crypto schemes, such as the private dinner taking place this week among the biggest holders of his $TRUMP memecoin, a kind of token whose only purpose is to attract money for its issuer. The White House has repeatedly pushed back on any questions about the president’s potential ethical conflicts, from his interest in accepting a luxury jet from Qatar to his family’s crypto holdings. (“This White House holds ourselves to the highest of ethical standards,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this month.) Not much has changed in the bill between then and now. But some Democrats dropped their opposition anyway, likely because they’re just accepting the “apparent inevitability of blockchain-based finance and of crypto more generally,” Prasad said. One of those Democrats was Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia who defended his reversal on the bill Monday. “Many senators, myself included, have very real concerns about the Trump family’s use of crypto technologies to evade oversight, hide shady financial dealings, and personally profit at the expense of everyday Americans,” Warner said in a statement. “But we cannot allow that corruption to blind us to the broader reality: blockchain technology is here to stay. If American lawmakers don’t shape it, others will – and not in ways that serve our interests or democratic values.” The Trump family owns a crypto platform called World Liberty Financial, which issues a stablecoin called USD1. A few weeks ago, an Abu Dhabi investment firm called MGX chose USD1 to finance a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance (see related crimes). That is “essentially giving Trump a cut of this enormous financial deal,” Warren said Monday in prepared remarks. So, yeah, it sure looks like once again Trump could get richer off an industry he directly oversees through a regulatory apparatus he is rapidly working to defang. Meanwhile, the crypto industry has plowed millions of dollars into industry Super PACs that gave heavily to both Republican and Democratic campaigns last year. Is that it? No, there’s more! A lot of the focus on corruption is merited, said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who has been studying stablecoin policy, in an interview Tuesday. But that’s not what’s keeping her up at night. She referred to the GENIUS bill as “a car crash in slow motion.“ “The thing that makes me lose the most sleep is that this bill would allow the largest tech platforms to essentially become the functional equivalent of banks,” said Allen, who was part of the commission appointed by Congress to study the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. “The last crisis was caused by ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions. The size of some of these tech platforms makes that look quaint.” Let’s step back for a moment. The bill provides almost no resistance for a tech giant like Meta or Amazon or Google to issue its own stablecoin. (In short, companies would have to get approval from a regulatory triad representing the Treasury, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve. As Prasad notes, that isn’t much of a hurdle under Trump’s broadly pro-crypto administration.) Meta already tried to get in on the crypto biz back in 2019 with a project called Libra (later renamed Diem), but abandoned it in 2022 in response to opposition from lawmakers and regulators. Now, according to a report in Fortune this month, Meta is once again testing the stablecoin waters, discussing various ways to introduce stablecoins as a means to manage in-app transactions. The benefits for Meta (or whomever) are clear: Stablecoin transactions keep users in the app, and the company then gathers all kinds of valuable information about its users and how they spend their money. But what happens when there’s a run on stablecoins, or some other financial shock that causes those financial businesses to fail? Proponents say there’s no reason to think there’ll be a run on stablecoins if they’ve got 100% cash reserves backing them. Of course, that thinking is premised on a “ridiculously optimistic assumption” that there will never be a run on a stablecoins, Allen says. She notes that money-market mutual funds are “almost identical in structure,” and are not immune from the kind of panic that causes bank runs. “Money-market mutual funds experienced runs that required bailouts in 2008 and again in 2020, so “I think runs on stablecoins are likely.” In fact, she notes, the government has already had to bail out a stablecoin when Silicon Valley Bank failed in 2023. The lender has more than $3 billion worth of a stablecoin called USDC among its vast uninsured deposits. “We may be setting ourselves up to essentially have to bail out these large tech platforms,” Allen says.

More than 100 organizations are raising alarms about a provision in the House’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package that would hamstring the regulation of artificial intelligence systems. Tucked into President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful” agenda bill is a rule that, if passed, would prohibit states from enforcing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” for 10 years. With AI rapidly advancing and extending into more areas of life — such as personal communications, health care, hiring and policing — blocking states from enforcing even their own laws related to the technology could harm users and society, the organizations said. They laid out their concerns in a letter sent Monday to members of Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making or using that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public,” the letter, provided exclusively to CNN ahead of its release, states. The bill cleared a key hurdle when the House Budget Committee voted to advance it on Sunday night, but it still must undergo a series of votes in the House before it can move to the Senate for consideration. The 141 signatories on the letter include academic institutions such as the University of Essex and Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, and advocacy groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Economic Policy Institute. Employee coalitions such as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and the Alphabet Workers Union, the labor group representing workers at Google’s parent company, also signed the letter, underscoring how widely held concerns about the future of AI development are. “The AI preemption provision is a dangerous giveaway to Big Tech CEOs who have bet everything on a society where unfinished, unaccountable AI is prematurely forced into every aspect of our lives,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at non-profit Demand Progress, which drafted the letter. “Speaker Johnson and Leader Jeffries must listen to the American people and not just Big Tech campaign donations,” Peterson-Cassin said in a statement. The letter comes as Trump has rolled back some of the limited federal rules for AI that had been existed prior to his second term. Shortly after taking office this year, Trump revoked a sweeping Biden-era executive order designed to provide at least some safeguards around artificial intelligence. He also said he would rescind Biden-era restrictions on the export of critical US AI chips earlier this month. Ensuring that the United States remains the global leader in AI, especially in the face of heightened competition from China, has been one of the president’s key priorities. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” Vice President JD Vance told heads of state and CEOs at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in February. US states, however, have increasingly moved to regulate some of the highest risk applications of AI in the absence of significant federal guidelines. Colorado, for example, passed a comprehensive AI law last year requiring tech companies to protect consumers from the risk of algorithmic discrimination in employment and other crucial decisions, and inform users when they’re interacting with an AI system. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, signed a law earlier this year that creates civil and criminal penalties for people who distribute misleading AI-generated deepfake content. And Ohio lawmakers are considering a bill that would require watermarks on AI-generated content and prohibit identity fraud using deepfakes. Multiple state legislatures have also passed laws regulating the use of AI-generated deepfakes in elections. That some applications of AI should be regulated has been a rare point of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill. On Monday, President Donald Trump is set to sign into law the Take It Down Act, which will make it illegal to share non-consensual, AI-generated explicit images, which passed both the House and Senate with support from both sides of the aisle. The budget bill provision would run counter to the calls from some tech leaders for more regulation of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified to a Senate subcommittee in 2023 that “regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” More recently on Capitol Hill, Altman said he agreed that a risk-based approach to regulating AI “makes a lot of sense,” although he urged federal lawmakers to create clear guidelines to help tech companies navigating a patchwork of state regulations. “We need to make sure that companies like OpenAI and others have legal clarity on how we’re going to operate. Of course, there will be rules. Of course, there need to be some guardrails,” he said. But, he added, “we need to be able to understand how we’re going to offer services, and where the rules of the road are going to be.”

Elon Musk says he’ll be sticking around as CEO of Tesla for the next few years. During an interview Tuesday at Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum in Doha, Musk was asked if he was committed to being the leader of Tesla for the next five years, and he responded with a “yes.” When asked in a followup if he had any doubts about that plan, he said “well, I might die.” Musk, who also runs other companies including SpaceX, has spent a significant amount of time this year working for the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives, making investors nervous that he isn’t devoting enough time to Tesla. The automaker’s sales have also plunged 13% in the first three months of this year, the largest drop in deliveries in its history. But “the only things that matter in long term are autonomy and Optimus,” the company’s planned humanoid robot, which is still in development, Musk said in an interview later Tuesday with CNBC. “Those overwhelmingly dominate the future of financial success of the company.” Musk said that he was confident that, in five years, robotaxis will be ubiquitous. But Musk has laid out ambitious timelines for robotaxis and self-diriving cars in the past – without meeting his self-declared goals. “Obviously my predictions on this have been overly optimistic in the past,” he said at an event last year. At the forum, Musk said his outsized pay package at Tesla, including shares of the car company, was meant to give him control in company votes. A Delaware court previously rejected Tesla’s plan to award Musk a package then worth $56 billion, as the company argued that it was needed to entice Musk to stay focused on the automaker. “The compensation should match that something incredible was done,” he said. “I’m confident that whatever some activist posing as a judge in Delaware happens to do will not affect the future compensation.” Musk said that the compensation plan was necessary not for its monetary value, but because he wants to remove the possibility that he could be ousted from the company by an activist investor. Musk’s recommitment to Tesla comes a few weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that the electric vehicle company had taken steps to work on a formal process to find a new CEO following the recent problems plaguing the company, notably slumping sales and protests. However, Musk denied the report, previously posting on X, “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!” Tesla’s chair, Robyn Denholm, also said the report was “absolutely false.” In April, Musk told investors that he would be stepping back from his role running DOGE this month, freeing up more time to run the car company. Tesla’s (TSLA) stock price had tumbled as much as 45% this year, but has rebounded and is only down 10%. The company’s shares jumped 1% in Tuesday trading.

The very basic meaning of what it means to ” Google” something – typing in keywords and sifting through links, images and information snippets is nearly behind us, according to Google. The search giant laid out its vision for the future of searching the web on Tuesday, introducing a flurry of updates that aim to shift Google’s ubiquitous search engine from being a box for processing keywords to a system of “digital agents” that can crawl the web and answer questions based on a person’s real-world surroundings, tastes and preferences. Google’s AI push comes as publishers – particularly independent ones – have already raised concerns about how the prominence of AI-generated answers could threaten their businesses. The announcements, made during the company’s annual developer conference, underscore that Google’s most important business is facing more competition than ever. Chatbots like ChatGPT and AI-fueled search engines such as Perplexity present an alternative way to find information and get things done – two tasks firmly at the center of Google’s core business. The newly announced tools can be seen as an effort to prove its nearly 30-year-old search engine isn’t losing relevance in the AI era. “What all this progress tells me is that we are now entering a new phase of the AI platform shift, where decades of research are now becoming reality for people, businesses and communities all over the world,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said in a press briefing ahead of the conference. ‘AI Mode’ Google is broadening AI Mode, previously only available to those who signed up to test early features through its Labs program, to all US users through the Google app. It’s a step beyond AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers consumers see at the top of results. The primary difference between AI Mode and a standard Google search is the way it processes queries. Instead of just looking at the whole question, AI Mode breaks queries down into subtopics and generates additional searches based on those subtopics to provide a more specific answer. Google says AI Mode will soon draw on a person’s search history to further personalize answers, and users will also be able to link it to other Google apps, like Gmail. Beyond how it processes questions, AI Mode is expected to offer two key new ways of searching: one that it claims will handle tasks on a user’s behalf, and another that lets them show Google their surroundings using their phone’s camera. Although AI Mode is now generally available in the US, these two specific features will still require users to sign up for Labs. Google’s Project Mariner technology, which the company announced as a research prototype last year, will be able to accomplish certain tasks on a person’s behalf and answer questions that usually require multiple steps, the company claims. For example, one could ask a question such as “Find two affordable tickets for this Sunday’s Reds game in the lower level,” and Google will search for tickets, analyze options and pricing, fill out forms autonomously and then pull up tickets that match the user’s criteria. It will initially be available for buying tickets, making restaurant reservations and booking local appointments through services such as Ticketmaster, StubHub, Resy and Vagaro, and will come to the Labs section of the Google app in the coming months. AI Mode in the Google app is also getting a new feature that lets users ask questions about the world around them. Visual search isn’t new to Google; the company’s Lens tool already lets users ask questions about photos they’ve snapped. But this mode takes that idea a step further by showing Google what a person is seeing in real time. The idea is to make it easier for Google to answer questions about complex tasks that are difficult to describe – such as whether the specific bolt in the toolbox is the right size for the bike frame being fixed – just by pointing a phone at it and asking. Google previously brought this visual search functionality to its Gemini assistant on Android, which it’s now expanding to the iPhone. But Tuesday’s announcement shows Google sees it as being key to the future of its search engine as well. Some of the new search capabilities overlap with those available in Google’s Gemini assistant, potentially causing confusion among consumers. Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google search, told CNN that search is tailored for learning, while Gemini is meant to be a helper for tasks like generating code and writing business plans in addition to answering questions. Google’s competition Google’s search engine has been the primary vessel for finding information online for nearly three decades. But that position is being challenged more than ever due to the proliferation of AI services from companies like OpenAI and Perplexity, as well as fellow tech stalwarts like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft – all of which have upgraded or are in the process of upgrading their virtual assistants with advanced AI capabilities. OpenAI, Google’s chief rival in the AI assistant space, has launched its own search engine. Google’s increased competition became evident earlier this month when Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, revealed in courtroom testimony that Google searches in its Safari browser in April had decreased for the first time since 2002, Bloomberg reported. Google has pushed back on that statement, saying it’s seen “overall query growth in search” including those coming from Apple devices. Market research firm Gartner estimated last year that search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as consumers gravitate toward AI tools. But Pichai, on a call with reporters, said the updates reflect the new ways people are using his company’s search engine. “When I look ahead, you’ve got glimpses of a proactive world, an agentic world,” he said. “All of this will keep getting better.”

The top executive in charge of CBS News resigned on Monday amid President Trump’s intensifying political pressure against the news operation. Wendy McMahon alluded to a “challenging” past few months in a farewell memo to employees. “It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” she wrote. “It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership.” While McMahon did not address Trump’s legally dubious lawsuit against CBS in the memo, the suit has been top of mind in recent months. McMahon has publicly stood up for the news division while its parent company, Paramount Global, has sought to settle with Trump while trying to win administration approval for its pending merger with Skydance Media. The clash between editorial principles and corporate priorities has profoundly shaken CBS, one of America’s most distinguished broadcast networks. Last month, “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, who ran the program that triggered Trump’s ire, said he was stepping down, citing a loss of independence. Owens and McMahon praised each other at the time, signaling a united front against Trump’s legal attacks. Thus, McMahon’s exit — coming one day after the season finale of “60 Minutes,” no less — has employees feeling “like a purge is underway,” as one CBS correspondent told CNN on Monday. The correspondent spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak publicly. McMahon’s departure also stirred speculation that a Paramount settlement with Trump is imminent. The company has not commented. In a memo on Monday morning, Paramount Global co-CEO George Cheeks thanked McMahon for four years of leadership. He said that McMahon’s recently named number two, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, will now report directly to him. A person with knowledge of the matter pointed out that McMahon’s departure removes a layer of management at a time when Paramount is trying to slim down and spend less. McMahon’s future was also far from certain under Skydance, the company that is trying to take control of CBS and the rest of Paramount. But by stepping down now, and referencing corporate disagreements about the “path forward,” McMahon is highlighting Paramount’s controversial dealings with the president. Trump sued CBS over the editing of last October’s “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit’s allegations that CBS violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer protection law, have been derided by legal experts as frivolous and ridiculous. CBS lawyers defended “60 Minutes” and its editorial judgment on First Amendment grounds. But Trump has blasted the network over and over again, at times even urging the FCC, an agency he has sought to control, to punish CBS by revoking its licenses. With the FCC tasked with reviewing the Paramount-Skydance deal, top executives sought to settle with Trump to make the lawsuit go away. Mediation talks reportedly began at the end of April. The notion of a settlement is anathema to “60 Minutes” employees. The transcript of the Harris interview, which CBS provided to the FCC in February, confirmed what the network said all along: It engaged in normal editing, not any nefarious activity like Trump alleged. Months before resigning, Owens told “60 Minutes” employees that he would not apologize as part of any settlement, since the newsmagazine did not do anything to warrant saying sorry. McMahon also told colleagues that apologizing was a “red line” she would not cross, according to two sources who spoke with her about it. Despite Trump’s attacks, “60 Minutes” continued to broadcast probing reports about his administration all winter and spring long. McMahon acknowledged the viewing audience in her memo Monday, writing, “Thank you for your trust. You hold us accountable, and you remind us why this work matters.” Anna Gomez, one of the Democrats on the Republican-controlled FCC, wrote on X that McMahon’s departure was “beyond alarming.” “Independent journalists are being silenced simply because their reporting may threaten the ambitions of their corporate owners,” Gomez wrote. “It will only embolden an Administration hell-bent on censoring speech and controlling content.”

In 2025, Dan Bongino, FBI deputy director, disappointed the 2023 version of himself. In 2023, Dan Bongino, star podcaster, demanded to know: “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” “I have reviewed the case. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself,” he wrote Sunday in an X post. Bongino was flooded with replies, many of the accusatory variety, from people who refuse to believe him. The backlash to Bongino’s factual statement is part of a broader political phenomenon. Some self-identified loyalists of President Trump are turning against Trump’s top law enforcement officials, partly because of the unsupported MAGA media claims that made those officials popular in the first place. Conspiracy thinking has been a defining trait of the MAGA movement for as long as Trump has been a political candidate. Right-wing media personalities like Bongino, acting as Trump’s top attack dogs, routinely floated unproven theories as a way to malign Trump’s political opponents. But now some of that conspiratorial talk has boomeranged back around. Listeners accustomed to “just asking questions” innuendo aren’t accepting the answers they’re getting. Bongino’s contentious post on X came after he and his boss, FBI director Kash Patel, appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show. The choice of platform was telling: Bartiromo is a Trump zealot, her show is a regular promoter of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and is widely trusted by the president’s base. Sunday’s telecast was billed as a long-awaited exclusive interview. Patel and Bongino blamed past FBI leaders for political bias and insisted that they are fixing what Trump fans believe is broken about the agency. “You’re about to see a wave of transparency,” Patel said in response to Bartiromo’s pressure for “accountability” over the FBI’s now-infamous Trump-Russia probe. But the two men also repeatedly tried to tamp down expectations about future revelations. And in a couple of cases they tried to deflate conspiratorial claims that have propped up and united Trump’s base. Numerous MAGA media influencers have argued that the government is covering up information about last year’s Trump assassination attempts, for example. Bongino tried to let those people down easy. When Bartiromo asked about the cases, he let out a sigh, then emphasized that he had personally reviewed all the evidence. “I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” he said. “And whether you like it or not is up to you. If there was a big explosive ‘there’ there… we would have told you.” Bongino, who used to host a show on Fox, seemed astutely aware of his audience during the interview. It is an audience that favors Fox’s hyperpartisan opinion shows over hard news coverage; an audience that eagerly shares social media memes about supposed liberal criminality and corruption. “In Bongino’s case, his audience has been told for years that prominent liberals and deep-state operatives have committed blatant crimes against the Trump family that should be easy to prosecute,” Will Sommer of The Bulwark wrote last month. “Yet no top Democrats have been indicted, leading Trump fans to believe Bongino is falling down on the job.” Bongino has repeatedly asked for patience in his social media posts. “Just because you don’t immediately see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” he wrote in one such X post last month. Some of his former viewers and listeners are deeply skeptical — of everything that conflicts with their preferred version of reality. Bartiromo alluded to that in the interview when she said to Patel, “You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.” “Listen,” Patel said, “they have a right to their opinion,” but then he joined Bongino in trying to extinguish a conspiracy theory that has raged in right-wing media circles ever since Epstein died in 2019. In his follow-up post on Sunday, Bongino told people, “I’m not asking you to believe me, or not. I’m telling you what exists, and what doesn’t. If new evidence surfaces I’m happy to reevaluate.” Tommy Vietor, who served in the Obama administration and now co-hosts “Pod Save America,” wrote Sunday that it was “fascinating to watch Patel and Bongino transition from feeding the base lies and conspiracy theories to being in positions of actual responsibility and occasionally having to tell the truth.” On topics like the January 6 attack, which stirred many far-right conspiracy theories that attempted to absolve Trump of blame, Patel said, “We’ve got answers coming.” But as Bongino put it, when referring to the assassination attempts, “in some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for, is not there.”