By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior FBI official who served as acting director in the first weeks of the Trump administration and resisted demands to turn over the names of agents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, investigations is being forced out of the bureau, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday.

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The circumstances of Brian Driscoll’s ouster were not immediately clear, but his final day is Friday, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the personnel move by name and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Additional ousters were possible.

Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment.

The news comes amid a much broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of current FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Numerous senior officials including top agents in charge of big-city field offices have been pushed out of their jobs and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.

Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked international counterterrorism investigations in New York and had also commanded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations.

Driscoll was named acting director in January to replace Christopher Wray and served in the position as Patel’s nomination was pending.

He made headlines after he and Rob Kissane, the then-deputy director, resisted Trump administration demands for information about agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was last week confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI’s top leaders of “insubordination.”

Responding to Bove’s request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names.

The FBI has moved under Patel’s watch to aggressively demote, reassign or push out agents. In April, for instance, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

Numerous special agents in charge of field offices have been told to retire, resign or accept reassignment.

Another agent, Michael Feinberg, has said publicly that he was told to resign or accept a demotion amid scrutiny from leadership of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a lead agent on the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation who was fired by the Justice Department in 2018 following revelations that he had exchanged negative text messages about President Donald Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.

By YURI KAGEYAMA

TOKYO (AP) — Toyota’s profit plunged 37% in the April-June quarter, the company said Thursday, cutting its full year earnings forecasts largely because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

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The Japanese automaker said it based its report on the assumption that Trump’s tariffs on exports from Japan, including autos, would be 12.5% starting this month. As of now they stand at 15%.

The world’s top automaker also makes vehicles in Mexico and Canada. Toyota’s profit in the last quarter totaled 841 billion yen, or $5.7 billion, down from 1.33 trillion yen in the same period the year before. Its quarterly sales rose 3%.

The status of those exports is unclear since Mexico and Canada are beneficiaries of the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, renegotiated from a 1990s pact during Trump’s first term in office, that eliminated most tariffs and trade barriers between the three countries.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s April-June profit totaled 841 billion yen ($5.7 billion), down from 1.33 trillion yen in the same period of 2024. Quarterly sales rose 3% to 12 trillion yen ($82 billion).

Toyota said the tariffs cost its quarterly operating profit 450 billion yen ($3 billion). Cost reduction efforts and the negative impact of an unfavorable exchange rate also hurt its bottom line.

The company, which makes the Camry sedan and Lexus luxury models, forecast a 2.66 trillion yen ($18 billion) profit for the full fiscal year ending in March 2026, down from an earlier forecast for a 3.1 trillion yen ($21 billion) profit. Toyota earned nearly 4.8 trillion yen in the previous fiscal year.

“Despite a challenging external environment, we have continued to make comprehensive investments, as well as improvements such as increased unit sales, cost reductions and expanded value chain profits,” Toyota said in a statement that outlined its efforts to minimize the impact of the tariffs.

At the retail level, Toyota sold 2.4 million vehicles globally, with sales growing in Japan, North America and Europe from the previous year, when global retail totaled 2.2 million vehicles.

Analysts say Toyota is likely among the worst hit by the tariffs among global companies, even compared with other Japanese automakers.

Also Thursday, Toyota announced it was building a new car assembly plant in Japan that it expects to have up and running in the early 2030s. It is acquiring a site in Toyota city, Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, where the automaker is headquartered.

The models to be produced there are still undecided, but the plant will be part of the company’s plan to maintain a production capacity of 3 million vehicles in Japan, according to Toyota. Billed as “a plant of the future,” it will also feature new technology tailored for what Toyota said will be a diverse work force.

Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage has fallen to its lowest level in four months, welcome news for prospective homebuyers who have been held back by stubbornly high home financing costs.

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The long-term rate fell to 6.63% from 6.72% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.47%.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also fell. The average rate dropped to 5.75% from 5.85% last week. A year ago, it was 5.63%, Freddie Mac said.

Elevated mortgage rates have helped keep the U.S. housing market in a sales slump that began in early 2022, when rates started to climb from the rock-bottom lows they reached during the pandemic. Home sales sank last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years.

For much of 2025, the average long-term mortgage rate has remained relatively close to the 7.04% high for this year that it reached in mid-January.

This is the third week in a row that rates have come down. The latest average rate on a 30-year mortgage is now just shy of 6.62%, the low point for this year set April 10.

Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation.

The main barometer is the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The yield was at 4.23% at midday Thursday, up slightly from 4.22% late Wednesday.

The yield is well below where it was last week, before Friday’s weaker-than-expected report on the U.S. job market ignited worries that the Trump administration’s tariffs are stalling hiring plans by employers.

Last Wednesday, the central bank’s policymaking committee voted to hold its main interest rate steady. And Fed Chair Jerome Powell pushed back on expectations that the Fed could cut rates at its next meeting in September, noting that inflation remained above the Fed’s 2% target and the job market was “in balance.”

But the latest jobs report may shift that stance. Traders on Wall Street are now betting heavily that the Fed will need to cut interest rates next month, something President Donald Trump has been demanding the Fed, and Powell specifically, to do.

A cut in rates could give the job market and overall economy a boost, but it could also fuel inflation just as Trump’s tariff policies risk raising prices for U.S. consumers.

“While both buyers and sellers welcome lower mortgage rates, it’s not clear whether rates will continue to fall,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. “A weaker economy could lead to lower mortgage rates, but the risks of higher inflation could keep rates elevated.”

For anyone who lived through the tabloid years of the aughts, Lindsay Lohan’s joyful return to the big screen isn’t just cause for celebration, it’s something that once seemed highly implausible. Lohan, the preeminent teen screen icon of the Y2K era, was subjected to a brutally judgmental media landscape in her young adulthood, which picked apart her partying, appearance, love life, erratic behavior, career choices and general mischief-making before she eventually slipped off the radar. In the past few years, she’s mounted a comeback via Netflix originals and a cameo in last year’s “Mean Girls” reboot, but seeing her star in a fun, fresh revival of one of her signature early 2000s hits feels nothing short of miraculous.

It’s also a miracle that “Freakier Friday” is as funny and entertaining as it is, because reboots and sequels bear a heavy burden of comparison to their beloved originals. Mark Waters’ 2003 film “Freaky Friday” (a remake of the 1976 film based on the book by Mary Rodgers) was a bona fide hit, and what’s clear — and crucial — in “Freakier Friday” is that writer Jordan Weiss and director Nisha Ganatra (Elyse Hollander has a story credit) have a true love and appreciation not just for the original film, but for Lohan’s filmography, and the entire subgenre of Disney Channel Original Movies. They throw the concept of a “guilty pleasure” to the wind and craft a comedy that’s giddily liberating in its celebration of every corny trope.

Somehow, “Freakier Friday” is self-aware but not sarcastic, knowing but not ironic, slapstick while remaining sincere, clever without being glib. It’s not a teardown or parody of the teen girly genre but a reaffirmation of it with a modern lens. It’s the kind of movie that an elder millennial mom and her Gen Alpha daughter can both enjoy on their own levels.

While “Freaky Friday” is a love letter to moms and daughters who learn to walk in each other’s shoes, “Freakier” is a sister story, and what it means to fold new family members in with the old. Our former teen rocker Anna (Lohan) is now a successful music manager in Los Angeles and a single mom to surfer girl Harper (Julia Butters). Her mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), a therapist with a podcast, has assigned herself as grand-co-parent, and Anna chafes against her mother’s overbearing insertion of herself into her parenting.

That storyline quickly fades when Anna falls for another single parent, Eric (Manny Jacinto), who happens to be the father of Harper’s lab partner, Lily (Sophie Hammons). Too bad the girls can’t stand each other, and Lily wants to return to her native London while Harper can’t bear to be far from the beach. With Anna and Eric’s wedding looming (their courtship is depicted in a rapid-fire montage of snapshots and love notes), a peace accord must be forged. There’s only one thing that can resolve this battle of wills: body swap!

A visit with kooky psychic/spiritual grifter Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) leaves the teen girls with a mantra, “change the hearts that are wrong, and you will find where you belong.” A mysterious earthquake, a full moon, and boom: it’s a double swap. Mother and daughter Harper and Anna wake up in each other’s bodies, while Lily ends up in the body of her future step-grandmother Tess. Does that track? Not really. But if it gets Curtis into a bunch of wacky costumes, we’ll take it, and the excellent costume design by Natalie O’Brien does a lot of heavy lifting, story-wise.

Curtis is the hands-down superstar of “Freakier Friday.” While this may be Lohan’s big comeback, with the love story and the big climactic rock star moment, the movie belongs to Curtis. She gets the biggest material to play with, as the whiny fashionista teen princess Lily, and jumps at the opportunity to play the physical comedy to the max.

It’s nice to see Lohan having fun again, even if the spunk that made her a teen star feels slightly sanded down. Ganatra and Weiss throw a ton of high jinks, jokes, references and comedy heavy-hitters into the film so that it never slows down — even if it’s stuffed to bursting with bits. Almost every supporting actor from the original is back, and “Freakier Friday” manages to hit a sweet spot of nostalgia without being an outright period piece.

It’s easy to question the necessity of reboots and legacyquels in this IP-obsessed movie landscape. But “Freakier Friday” feels genuinely restorative, not just for Lohan’s reputation, but for the inner child who once loved movies like this, delighting in silly tropes like food fights, hunks tossing their hair in slow-motion and makeover montages. Ganatra has delivered us a love letter to that movie, and it’s a true joy to revel in that playground once again.

‘Freakier Friday’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references)

Running time: 1:51

How to watch: In theaters on Friday, Aug. 8

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