Richard Lawler | The Verge

Judge pauses Paramount’s attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery

2026-07-20T16:08:57-04:00

A judge partially granted the request from a dozen state attorneys general to temporarily place the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on hold, as reported by Variety and Reuters. US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said that based on the new company’s market share, “the Court is persuaded that it can presume the proposed merger is likely to violate antitrust laws,” and that the states showed “irreparable harm” could occur without a temporary restraining order.

A week ago, California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington sued to block the deal for 28 days, saying the newly created “media behemoth” would harm competition, and that if the deal is allowed to close, then the companies could start hard-to-undo actions like layoffs and information sharing.

The judge put in place a 14-day restraining order and set a hearing for the preliminary injunction on August 3rd. If the deal hasn’t closed by September 30th, Paramount will owe Warner Bros. investors millions of dollars based on how long it takes, as laid out in the agreement it used to beat Netflix’s $83 billion offer.

California AG Rob Bonta said over the weekend that the ticking fee starting in October “is a choice that Paramount made. They agreed to it as a party with Warner Bros. They might regret it, but they absolutely knew that this proposed merger was going to have to go through a regulatory process, and that that would take time,” while also dismissing threats about Paramount moving out of California, and saying that a CNN spinoff plan wouldn’t resolve the states’ lawsuit. After the judge’s decision was released on Monday, Bonta released a statement saying, “This is a critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day.”

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Taylor Farms pulls iceberg lettuce from the US market after cyclosporiasis outbreak

2026-07-20T05:32:02-04:00

Agriculture - Harvested Iceberg lettuce / Santa Maria, California. | Photo by: Tony Hertz /Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Food producer Taylor Farms released a statement on the Cyclospora outbreak Friday, confirming that it’s “voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the US market.” Reuters reports that, according to a source, Taylor Farms told customers like Yum Brands owner Taco Bell and the food distributor Sysco on Thursday to pull shredded lettuce that had been produced initially as 5-pound bags at a facility in Guanajuato, Mexico, from distribution.

Taco Bell said on Thursday that “The affected ingredient from our supplier is being indefinitely removed from our supply chain nationwide and will be replaced within 24 hours in select states.”

The Cyclospora parasite infects humans’ small intestine, can take up to one to two weeks to incubate, and causes symptoms including “watery diarrhea, with frequent bowel movements… vomiting, body aches, headache, low-grade fever, and other flu-like symptoms,” that may seem to go away and then come back more than once.

As The Verge reported this week, not all of the reported cases have been linked to Taco Bell, and Taylor Farms is a giant, which has said it sells more than $7 billion in produce every year and makes two out of every five of the salad kits sold in grocery stores. However, its name doesn’t appear on most of those items, and while the extent of the outbreak is still under investigation, the CDC has said it’s also looking into illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated.

Taylor Farms:

Based on information provided yesterday by the FDA, Taylor Farms de Mexico is voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S. market.

While the FDA traceback is indicating a specific independent farm that represents less than 1% of the U.S.’s iceberg lettuce supply as the potential source of the outbreak, we have removed all iceberg lettuce from the region indefinitely.

It hasn’t identified other companies or products to avoid yet. ProPublica’s Annie Waldman reports that the tracing effort is working without more than 240 consumer safety specialists who left as the Trump administration cut funding to federal health agencies, and the CDC scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) that worked with 10 states.

The Washington Post also mentions that a few months ago, the FDA pushed back the compliance deadline on implementing its Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods (Food Traceability Final Rule) from January 20th, 2026, until July 20th, 2028. Its requirement for standardized record-keeping about goods and shipments could’ve made finding the “specific independent farm” tied to the outbreak easier and faster.

This all follows statements from the CDC and FDA saying the “explosive diarrhea parasite” outbreak has been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations across five states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. In Michigan alone, there are over 5,000 reported cases, with 102 reports of hospitalization.

According to the FDA, “FDA and state partners are actively investigating the source and scope of the contamination. Because the investigation remains ongoing, additional implicated brands, restaurants, retailers, or distribution channels may be identified as the investigation continues.”

Netflix is using an AI-generated Gene Wilder voice in its Willy Wonka reality show

2026-06-30T13:24:34-04:00

A new teaser trailer confirmed that Wonka’s The Golden Ticket will premiere on Netflix on September 23rd, following its Squid Game reality show in the trend of creating real competitions based on fictional torture scenarios. While the sets seen in the trailer are real and not some Glasgow-style AI fakes, the voiceover is AI-generated.

Deadline reports that Netflix worked with AI audio company ElevenLabs with consent from Wilder’s family, after working on productions re-creating the voice of Michael Caine and Stan Lee. It also continues Netflix’s 2021 partnership with the Roald Dahl company, and is separate from the Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory animated feature that will arrive in 2027.

As for the show itself, Netflix says its “high-stakes social experiment” will feature 12 “lucky” golden ticket winners plus their chosen partner in the competition, with one champion left standing a week later during the two-part finale on September 30th.

Google is finally opening the Play Store to outside payments

2026-06-24T14:09:54-04:00

While the court still hasn’t signed off on the massive settlement resolving Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Google for having a monopoly over Android’s app store with Google Play, the tech giant says it will start rolling out changes to the way it handles billing for developers worldwide. As announced in March, the flat 30 percent billing fee is being replaced by “lower, decoupled fees” that partially decouple the billing and the app store.

How much of a cut Google will take from transactions now depends on whether it’s for a user whose first install came before or after the new structure, how much a developer has earned, and whether or not the developer uses Google Play’s billing system with its 5 percent additional fee, instead of an alternative system or linking to their own website.

For apps that make over a million dollars annually, that will be 20 percent for new in-app purchases and 10 percent for subscriptions. However Google has also announced Games Level Up and Apps Experience programs for “exceptional” and “premium ” experiences that meet its guidelines by working across platforms (like tablets, smart TVs, or Android Auto), meeting benchmarks for memory usage and crash rates, and supporting features it recommends (like cloud saves or phishing-resistant sign-ins) to qualify for a lower rate on both new and existing installs.

Other program changes will go into effect in some areas at the end of September, at the end of the year, before rolling out to the rest of the world after September 30th, 2027.

Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans

2026-06-18T06:05:21-04:00

“A scan of an imaging phantom, segmented to validate how cleanly structures separate under controlled conditions.“ | Image: Midjourney Medical

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the “cat pictures” produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it’s an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone, and organs to start. Holz said ideally, you could do this once a year or every single day, as it “aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways.”

He mentioned that one way he’d like to use it would be to see how his body changes in response to diet and workout changes, saying, “I’m not the most measured man on Earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily [measurable information].” A set of job listings advertises the company’s goal as trying to “build and launch the world’s first full-body ultrasound CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.”

The Midjourney Scanner was developed in a partnership with ultrasound tech company Butterfly Network, which said it uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system.”

This is Midjourney’s AI segmentation overlay of a black-and-white ultrasound scan. | Image: Midjourney Medical" data-portal-copyright="Image: Midjourney Medical" />

The scanning process starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves. It then records the ripples passing through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images. The scan takes about 60 seconds. Holz said about a dozen people have been scanned so far.

Here’s how Midjourney describes it:

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

It combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power. But after watching the livestreamed reveal, I’m still unclear on what Midjourney’s AI image generation tech exactly has to do with the Midjourney Medical effort, beyond an alternative business for otherwise-unused AI compute.

Holz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square that will open before the end of 2027 and offered to scan the hands of attendees at its launch event. The Midjourney Spa will have a gym, saunas, and cold plunges to go along with the hot tub–equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned.

He did mention that various medical applications would require FDA clearances, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging. It also says the “library of scans” users create can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or others, and that, “We take data privacy seriously — more details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”

Holz suggested that eventually these scans could become better than an MRI, without radiation, powerful magnets, or other complicating factors, to get a look at what’s going on inside people’s bodies “real fast.” In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at “weird” things and allowed people to “just try to get as much data as we can.”

Apple 2027 rumors: AirPods with cameras for AI and the second folding iPhone

2026-06-16T13:16:37-04:00

AirPods Pro 3 shown with an iPhone and live translation features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Now that we’re clear of WWDC and all of the new AI-powered features coming to Apple’s platforms, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has more details about rumored new hardware, like the camera-equipped AirPods he’d previously written about. He says they are currently on schedule for a late 2027 launch, and that while we’re checking out beta releases for this fall’s iOS 27 update, the new earbuds are internally being tested with next year’s update, iOS 28.

With cameras mounted in their stems and lights to indicate when data is being uploaded to the cloud, they could give the upgraded version of Siri “visual context” about your surroundings, before Apple eventually releases its first pair of smart glasses.

Also mentioned is a second-generation foldable phone to follow the model that he says we can expect to see this fall, as an indication that Apple will be committed to the new product category, and, hopefully, find even better ways to take advantage of the extra screens than we’ve seen in the category so far. I like my Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but between apps that fail to adjust for the bigger screen and a smaller battery than the largest standard Pixel 10, it adds a lot of compromises and a hefty price.

Gurman also mentioned the long-rumored “20th anniversary” iPhone, dubbed V73 and V74, which he says will follow this year’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max offering similar sizes, but adding a “nearly edge-to-edge display, with curved glass that wraps around the sides.”

Meanwhile, the standard iPhone 18 may not launch until next year, while running on an A20 series chip similar to phones planned for release this fall, before the other 2027 phones jump to a 2nm A21 chip, with plans to shift to 1.4nm technology for the A22 Pro, with Apple “considering” using Intel to handle some production along with its usual source, TSMC.

This seems to line up with the rumors of the last few years that previewed the arrival of the skinny iPhone Air. But with John Ternus taking over as Apple’s CEO, a RAM and component shortage looming over everything, and AI everywhere, even solidly rumored plans could change.

All the news about Anthropic’s new AI fight with the White House

2026-06-29T10:45:33-04:00

Anthropic was already navigating one dispute with the government in its standoff with the Pentagon, and then came an order on June 12th to block off foreign access to its most recently released AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. When they launched on June 9th, Anthropic said “Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available,” and that Claude Mythos 5 had the same underlying model, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.”

According to reports, the order came after conversations between Amazon and the White House about researchers saying they found ways to get Fable 5 to serve information that could be used in cyberattacks.

Anthropic responded by shutting access to both models for all customers, saying, “We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

Read along below for all of the latest updates

Instagram is finally letting everyone reorganize their profile grid

2026-06-08T19:58:42-04:00

Nearly a year after it was announced, Instagram says it’s delivering the ability to rearrange the posts in your profile grid. It had been available to some people in test groups, but as of June 8th, it’s rolling out widely via the Android and iPhone mobile apps.

Until now, the posts on your Instagram profile have been locked in chronological order beyond the ability to pin three posts at the top, but once the feature is live on your account, you can long-press and drag posts freely, no matter how old they are. Any posts that are pinned will remain at the top.

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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced the change in January of last year, with an apology to users whose carefully crafted profile pages had been wrecked when the app switched from square thumbnails to taller, more vertically oriented ones. His post today simply says “Finally,” even though the comments would suggest there are a few other changes Instagram users would like to see that they’ve been waiting to see, even longer than the release of a native iPad UI.

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Apple’s accessibility features add more AI-powered processing

2026-05-19T14:23:12-04:00

Apple’s annual update about accessibility features on its platforms has new additions for the iPhone, Mac, and especially Vision Pro, with a focus on how on-device AI processing is being used in features like VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader.

One addition that jumped out to me is the ability to use on-device speech recognition for uncaptioned videos, which will be available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro.

Other changes coming later this year will use AI to add more details to VoiceOver’s Image Explorer in descriptions of images (with a warning that they should not be relied on in any number of risky or potentially dangerous situations), and the ability to ask questions about what the camera sees by pressing the Action button. It’s also adding natural language navigation to the Voice Control system, and the Accessibility Reader will be ready to summarize more complex material.

The Hikawa Grip & Stand for iPhone | Image: Apple" data-portal-copyright="Image: Apple" />

A non-AI update mentioned is Apple making the MagSafe-compatible Hikawa Grip & Stand available worldwide via the Apple Store starting today in three colors.

The Vision Pro will be able to link its eye-tracking system to power wheelchair drive systems, including Tolt and LUCI in the US, and have support for connecting via Bluetooth or hardwired with the Developer Strap. It’s also getting Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion sickness for anyone putting on Apple’s $3,499 headset in a moving vehicle. For the other changes, like Larger Text support on tvOS and a new API for bringing sign language interpreters into FaceTime calls, read through the full press release.

LG will release the first 1000Hz, 1080p gaming monitor this year

2026-05-20T15:21:39-04:00

If you just can’t choose between refresh rate and resolution, LG’s next gaming monitor could solve your problem, as the UltraGear 25G590B monitor is the first one announced that will be capable of a native 1000Hz refresh rate at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. So far, the 1,000Hz models we’ve seen have only been capable of 720p at the most, but this 24.5-inch IPS display does not have that limitation, as the company says it’s ready for esports competitors (whether they’re in an FPS or Excel), who need maximum responsiveness.

We were already asking if anyone could feel the effect of higher refresh rates a few years ago when they hovered around 360 and 480Hz, but now the bar has moved higher once again.

LG hasn’t revealed the 25G590B’s price or release date beyond the “second half of 2026,” but said it has a “minimalist” stand and customizable lighting. More information will be available on LG’s website here.

Of course, there are also AI-enabled features, too:

The 25G590B incorporates on-device gaming AI features designed to boost both immersion and usability. AI Scene Optimization adds visual realism and depth by intelligently adjusting picture settings according to game genre, while AI Sound presents a more authentic spatial audio experience along with clearer in-game communications (when using a compatible headset). These AI-driven capabilities complement the monitor’s ultra-fast performance to create the ideal platform for competitive gaming.

Correction, May 20th: LG’s press release indicated this monitor would have a hook for headsets, but after publication, it released a corrected press release confirming that it does not. We have updated the post.