The News You Need on Friday, May 29, 2026.
Trump threatens to blow up Oman, is doing insider trading with Dell. What's happening at 60 Minutes? War on Iran exacerbates the situation in Sudan and Hegseth blows up more boats in the Caribbean.
Trump Corruption Watch
Trump Threatens to Blow Up Oman
The Independent
Scott: In the course of Donald Trump’s ritual cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump suddenly threatened to “blow up” Oman, a country which has been one of America’s oldest and most faithful allies in the region.
It should have been on the front page, above the fold, in every major US newspaper.
It was on the front pages of newspapers around the world, but not in the US.
Why?
US editors are afraid to run it.
The US president on Wednesday threatened Oman if it didn’t agree to his demands around control of the Strait of Hormuz, after Iranian state TV said it had obtained a draft of an agreement to restore commercial shipping with Iran and Oman jointly managing traffic.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei responded with indignation, warning the comments represented “another dangerous sign of the normalisation of lawlessness and bullying in international relations.”
Gambling on 60 Minutes’ Future
The Guardian
Charles: The odds against 60 Minutes remaining a pillar of American journalism grew longer yesterday with the ousting of executive producer Tanya Simon, the deeply respected CBS news producer who, in 2025, became the first woman to hold the position.
60 Minutes just completed its 58th season, with its ratings up 9% over last year, bringing it as many as 9.7 million viewers every week. It remains the fifth most watched show across all of television.
But for two years it has been in a fierce fight for its journalistic independence. Last year the network’s previous owner, Shari Redstone, was publicly unhappy over a segment featuring former State Department officials attacking the way the Biden administration had handled the war in Gaza. After executive producer Bill Owens was warned against doing any more stories about Gaza—and told to limit the number of times Donald Trump’s name was mentioned on the program—Owens quit the program.
The pressure on the program’s independence only increased after Redstone sold the network to David Ellison, whose father is one of Trump’s closest allies. Ellison installed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Yesterday Weiss announced she was replacing Tanya Simon with Nick Bilton.
The British-born Bilton is a former designer and tech columnist for The New York Times, and a former Vanity Fair editor who has produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix.
However, like Weiss, Bilton has no previous TV news experience.
In an interview with The New York Times yesterday, Bilton said it was necessary to bring in an outsider to revamp 60 Minutes for the rest of the 21st Century. “When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes,” he explained.
The Times said Bilton also promised to “experiment with new voices from outside traditional broadcast news.”
Besides Owens and Simon, Anderson Cooper announced he was leaving the show after Weiss had tried to make him the CBS News anchor. Correspondent Cecilia Vega was abruptly fired in May and Sharyn Alfonsi’s contract expired this week after she got into a battle royal with Bari Weiss over her segment about Venezuelan people who were deported from the United States to El Salvador.
Alfonsi called her de facto firing “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting. It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
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