By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press Technology Writer

Google will return to federal court Friday to fend off the U.S. Justice Department’s attempt to topple its internet empire at the same time it’s navigating a pivotal shift to artificial intelligence that could undercut its power.

The legal and technological threats facing Google are among the key issues that will be dissected during the closing arguments of a legal proceeding that will determine the changes imposed upon the company in the wake of its dominant search engine being declared as an illegal monopoly by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last year.

Brandishing evidence presented during a recent three-week stretch of hearings, Justice Department lawyers will attempt to persuade Mehta to order a radical shake-up that includes a ban on Google paying to lock its search engine in as the default on smart devices and an order requiring the company to sell its Chrome browser.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai smiles as he walks onto the stage at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Google lawyers are expected to assert only minor concessions are needed, especially as the upheaval triggered by advances in artificial intelligence already are reshaping the search landscape, as alternative, conversational search options are rolling out from AI startups that are hoping to use the Department of Justice’s four-and-half-year-old case to gain the upper hand in the next technological frontier.

“Over weeks of testimony, we heard from a series of well-funded companies eager to gain access to Google’s technology so they don’t have to innovate themselves,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post earlier this month. “What we didn’t hear was how DOJ’s extreme proposals would benefit consumers.”

After the day-long closing arguments, Mehta will spend much of the summer mulling a decision that he plans to issue before Labor Day. Google has already vowed to appeal the ruling that branded its search engine as a monopoly, a step it can’t take until the judge orders a remedy.

While both sides of this showdown agree that AI is an inflection point for the industry’s future, they have disparate views on how the shift will affect Google.

The Justice Department contends that AI technology by itself won’t rein in Google’s power, arguing additional legal restraints must be slapped on a search engine that’s the main reason its parent company, Alphabet Inc., is valued at $2 trillion.

Google has already been deploying AI to transform its search engine i nto an answer engine, an effort that has so far helped maintain its perch as the internet’s main gateway despite inroads being made by alternatives from the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity.

The Justice Department contends a divestiture of the Chrome browser that Google CEO Sundar Pichai helped build nearly 20 years ago would be among the most effective countermeasures against Google continuing to amass massive volumes of browser traffic and personal data that could be leveraged to retain its dominance in the AI era. Executives from both OpenAi and Perplexity testified last month that they would be eager bidders for the Chrome browser if Mehta orders its sale.

The debate over Google’s fate also has pulled in opinions from Apple, mobile app developers, legal scholars and startups.

Apple, which collects more than $20 billion annually to make Google the default search engine on the iPhone and its other devices, filed briefs arguing against the Justice Department’s proposed 10-year ban on such lucrative lock-in agreements. Apple told the judge that prohibiting the contracts would deprive the company of money that it funnels into its own research, and that the ban might even make Google even more powerful because the company would be able to hold onto its money while consumers would end up choosing its search engine anyway. The Cupertino, California, company also told the judge a ban wouldn’t compel it to build its own search engine to compete against Google.

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In other filings, a group of legal scholars said the Justice Department’s proposed divestiture of Chrome would be an improper penalty that would inject unwarranted government interference in a company’s business. Meanwhile, former Federal Trade Commission officials James Cooper and Andrew Stivers warned that another proposal that would require Google to share its data with rival search engines “does not account for the expectations users have developed over time regarding the privacy, security, and stewardship” of their personal information.

The App Association, a group that represents mostly small software developers, also advised Mehta not to adopt the Justice Department’s proposed changes because of the ripple effects they would have across the tech industry.

Hobbling Google in the way the Justice Department envisions would make it more difficult for startups to realize their goal of being acquired, the App Association wrote. “Developers will be overcome by uncertainty” if Google is torn apart, the group argues.

Buy Y Combinator, an incubator that has helped create hundreds of startups collectively worth about $800 billion filed documents pushing for the dramatic overhaul of Google, whose immense power has discouraged venture capitalists from investing in areas that are considered to be part of the company’s “kill zone.”

Startups “also need to be able to get their products into the hands of users, free from restrictive dealing and self-preferencing that locks up important distribution channels. As things stand, Google has locked up the most critical distribution channels, freezing the general search and search text advertising markets into static competition for more than a decade,” Y Combinator told Mehta.

By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, Associated Press

Scientists say 4 billion people, about half the world’s population, experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat because of human-caused climate change from May 2024 to May 2025.

The extreme heat caused illness, death, crop losses, and strained energy and health care systems, according to the analysis from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross.

“Although floods and cyclones often dominate headlines, heat is arguably the deadliest extreme event,” the report said. Many heat-related deaths are unreported or are mislabeled by other conditions like heart disease or kidney failure.

FILE – A man walks on a hot summer day in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan,File)

The scientists used peer-reviewed methods to study how much climate change boosted temperatures in an extreme heat event and calculated how much more likely its occurrence was because of climate change. In almost all countries in the world, the number of extreme heat days has at least doubled compared with a world without climate change.

Caribbean islands were among the hardest hit by additional extreme heat days. Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, endured 161 days of extreme heat. Without climate change, only 48 would have occurred.

“It makes it feel impossible to be outside,” said Charlotte Gossett Navarro, chief director for Puerto Rico at Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit focused on social and environmental issues in Latino communities, who lives in the San Juan area and was not involved in the report.

“Even something as simple as trying to have a day outdoors with family, we weren’t able to do it because the heat was too high,” she said, reporting feeling dizzy and sick last summer.

When the power goes out, which happens frequently in Puerto Rico in part because of decades of neglected grid maintenance and damage from Hurricane Maria in 2017, Navarro said it is difficult to sleep. “If you are someone relatively healthy, that is uncomfortable, it’s hard to sleep … but if you are someone who has a health condition, now your life is at risk,” Gossett Navarro said.

Heat waves are silent killers, said Friederike Otto, associate professor of climate science at Imperial College London, one of the report’s authors. “People don’t fall dead on the street in a heat wave … people either die in hospitals or in poorly insulated homes and therefore are just not seen,” he said.

FILE – A jogger runs along a trail in McAllister park as temperatures hit record highs, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay,File)

Low-income communities and vulnerable populations, such as older adults and people with medical conditions, suffer the most from extreme heat.

The high temperatures recorded in the extreme heat events that occurred in Central Asia in March, South Sudan in February and in the Mediterranean last July would have not been possible without climate change, according to the report. At least 21 people died in Morocco after temperatures hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit last July. People are noticing temperatures are getting hotter but don’t always know it is being driven by climate change, said Roop Singh, head of urban and attribution at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, in a World Weather Attribution statement.

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“We need to quickly scale our responses to heat through better early warning systems, heat action plans, and long-term planning for heat in urban areas to meet the rising challenge,” Singh said.

City-led initiatives to tackle extreme heat are becoming popular in parts of South Asia, North America, Europe and Australia to coordinate resources across governments and other agencies. One example is a tree-planting initiative launched in Marseille, France, to create more shaded areas.

The report says strategies to prepare for heat waves include monitoring and reporting systems for extreme temperatures, providing emergency health services, cooling shelters, updated building codes, enforcing heat safety rules at work, and designing cities to be more heat-resilient.

But without phasing out fossil fuels, heat waves will continue becoming more severe and frequent and protective measures against the heat will lose their effectiveness, the scientists said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By BRIAN MELLEY, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Actor and comedian Russell Brand pleaded not guilty in a London court Friday to rape and sexual assault charges involving four women dating back more than 25 years.

Brand, who turns 50 next week, denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court.

His trial was scheduled for June 3, 2026 and is expected to last four to five weeks.

English comedian and actor Russell Brand leaves Southwark Crown Court where he is charged with rape and sexual assault in London, Friday, May 30, 2025.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Prosecutors said that the offenses took place between 1999 and 2005 — one in the English seaside town of Bournemouth and the other three in London.

Brand didn’t speak to reporters as he arrived at court wearing dark sunglasses, a suit jacket, a black collared shirt open below his chest and black jeans. In his right hand, he clutched a copy of the “The Valley of Vision,” a collection of Puritan prayers.

The “Get Him To The Greek” actor known for risqué stand-up routines, battles with drugs and alcohol, has dropped out of the mainstream media in recent years and built a large following online with videos mixing wellness and conspiracy theories, as well as discussing religion.

On a five-minute prayer video he posted Monday on social media, Brand wrote: “Jesus, thank you for saving my life.”

When the charges were announced last month, he said that he welcomed the opportunity to prove his innocence.

“I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord,” he said in a social media video. “I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile. But what I never was was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”

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Brand is accused of raping a woman at a hotel room in Bournemouth when she attended a 1999 Labour Party conference and met him at an event where he was performing. The woman alleged that Brand stripped while she was in the bathroom and when she returned to the room he pushed her on the bed, removed her underwear and raped her.

A second woman said that Brand grabbed her forearm and attempted to drag her into a men’s toilet at a television station in London in 2001.

The third accuser was a television employee who met Brand at a birthday party in a bar in 2004, where he allegedly grabbed her breasts before pulling her into a toilet and forcing her to perform oral sex.

The final accuser worked at a radio station and met Brand while he was working on a spin-off of the “Big Brother” reality television program between 2004 and 2005. She said Brand grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks.

The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identity from the media for life.

By ALI SWENSON, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — As he crisscrossed the country in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to supporters that voting him back into the presidency would be “our final battle.”

“With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state,” he said repeatedly on the campaign trail. “We will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”

Four months into his second term, Trump has continued to stoke dark theories involving his predecessors and other powerful politicians and attorneys — most recently raising the specter of nefarious intent behind former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign papers. The administration has pledged to reopen investigations and has taken steps to declassify certain documents, including releasing more than 63,000 pages of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Yet many of Trump’s supporters say it’s not enough.

Some who take him at his word are beginning to get restless as they ask why his administration, which holds the keys to chasing down these alleged government secrets, is denying them the evidence and retribution they expected.

His Justice Department has not yet arrested hordes of “deep state” actors as some of his supporters had hoped it would, even as the president has been posting cryptic videos and memes about Democratic politicians.

“People are tired of not knowing,” conservative commentator Damani Felder said on podcaster Tim Pool’s show last week. “We actually demand answers and real transparency. It’s not that hard to deliver.”

A promise to reveal and dismantle the ‘deep state’

Trump has long promised to dismantle the “deep state” — a supposed secret network of powerful people manipulating government decisions behind the scenes — to build his base of support, said Yotam Ophir, a communications professor at the University at Buffalo.

“He built part of this universe, which at the end of the day is a fictional universe,” he said.

Now that Trump is in power and has stocked loyalists throughout his administration, his supporters expect all to be revealed. Delivering on that is difficult when many of the conspiracies he alleged aren’t real, said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist who studies conspiracy theories at the University of Miami.

To be sure, the president has prioritized retribution in his second administration. He has fired federal workers, installed loyalists in key positions and targeted law firms he disfavors in executive orders. He has ordered the revocation of government security clearances for political rivals and former employees who dissented during his first term. His Justice Department has fired prosecutors who investigated him and scrutinized career FBI agents who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Even so, Trump’s administration hasn’t gone as far as many of his supporters would like. They want to see steps taken against people he has long claimed were involved in sinister plots against him, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey. The administration also hasn’t offered proof of the “ egregious crimes ” that Trump claims have corrupted the federal government for years.

Conspiracy theorists focus on Epstein and Trump’s assassination attempt

Tensions erupted this month when FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, dismissed two of the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that have animated Trump’s base the most — that financier and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in a cover-up, and that Trump’s attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a government plot.

FILE – Daniel Bongino speaks during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, June 10, 2020, in Washington. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via AP, File)

“You know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was,” Patel said about Epstein’s death in a Fox News interview.

“I have seen the whole file,” Bongino added. “He killed himself.”

Conservatives online demanded to see the evidence, pointing to Bongino’s past statements as a podcast host, when he suggested the government was hiding information about Epstein.

“No matter who gets elected, you get the same foreign policy, you get the same economic policy, and the Epstein videos remain secret,” right-wing podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show.

“They told us for months leading up to the Election that it wasn’t suicide,” Newsmax host Todd Starnes wrote on X.. “But now they tell us it was suicide.” He added: “Pardon me, but what the heck is going on at DOJ?”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said this month that FBI officials were poring through “tens of thousands” of videos related to Epstein and would make more materials public once they took steps to protect the victims.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, and FBI Director Kash Patel speak during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the same Fox News interview, Bongino and Patel said they had been briefed on the attempted assassination of Trump during a rally in July and there was no explosive conspiracy to be revealed.

“In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there,” Bongino said.

Skepticism among ‘deep state’ believers

Bongino appeared to try to throw a bone to Trump’s base this week when he announced the agency would reopen some prominent cases that have attracted public interest. He said the FBI would investigate the planting of pipe bombs found near the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion in 2022 that overturned the constitutional right to abortion and the discovery of cocaine in the White House in 2023.

But it wasn’t enough for everyone who weighed in on his X account.

“Anything to distract from the Epstein files,” one user replied to his announcement. “No results,” wrote another.

In an interview Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” Bongino teased that the FBI would soon release video captured outside Epstein’s jail cell and materials related to Trump’s attempted assassination.

He said he understands the public’s demands for transparency but called for patience and noted not all information is the FBI’s to declassify. That didn’t satisfy everyone who wants answers to the conspiracy theories.

“I am convinced that the deep state can only be defeated by God at this point,” Philip Anderson, a right-wing influencer who participated in the riot at the Capitol, wrote Thursday on X. “Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi are completely useless.”

Promoting conspiracy theories as a tactic to distract

All the while, Trump has continued promoting conspiracy theories on his Truth Social platform and elsewhere.

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He shared a video this month about mysterious deaths allegedly being linked to the Clinton family and shared someone’s image of himself with former President Barack Obama with the text, “ALL ROADS LEAD TO OBAMA, RETRUTH IF YOU WANT MILITARY TRIBUNALS.”

Ophir, the University at Buffalo professor, said it’s a tactic that distracts Trump’s base and helps inoculate him from criticism.

“When something good happens, it’s because Trump is great and his agenda is brilliant,” Ophir said. “When something bad happens, it’s because of the Obamas or the Clintons or whatever forces are undermining him from within Washington.”

Trump this week fueled newer theories, without sharing evidence, that Biden’s use of a mechanical device called an autopen during his presidency meant he didn’t sign his executive orders willingly or that aides profited from controlling it. He has called for people who operated it to be charged with “TREASON.”

The narrative has gained momentum on the right because of allegations that Biden’s aides covered up his mental and physical decline. Presidents have used autopens for years to sign certain documents.

“Whoever used it was usurping the power of the Presidency, and it should be very easy to find out who that person (or persons) is,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

At least one user of his platform was unimpressed and questioned why Trump and his allies, holding all the power, still didn’t have any answers.

“IF IT’S EASY,” the commenter posted. “WHY HASN’T YOUR ADMINISTRATION FOUND THESE CRIMINAL’S ALREADY.”

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about the AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.