CBS News

Paramount Skydance's $110bn takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the deal that would remake CBS's own corporate structure, cleared the Department of Justice on 12 June, but three further clearances remained: FCC approval given the combined company's near-half foreign ownership, an EU ruling due 14 July, and the possibility of state attorney-general lawsuits .

By 1 July the deal had hit three separate snags at once: Brussels pushed its own merger Deadline from 7 to 22 July, a Gulf-financing subsidies probe was due 14 July, and US senators who asked the FCC to block the deal outright by 1 July over its 49.5 per cent foreign ownership got no response . All three clocks have to clear before CBS's ownership structure can change.

The Pentagon cut its official Iran war death toll to 14 from 18 on 24 July, dropping four service members killed earlier in the month; acting press secretary Joel Valdez blamed "temporary data disruptions", while three military officials told reporters a late-April ceasefire cutoff had been applied retroactively .

The same night, the wounded total fell from 482 to 420, a drop of 62 that four fewer confirmed deaths cannot explain; an unnamed US official said the real wounded figure could exceed 500 . The discrepancy, surfaced through Pentagon-beat reporting from outlets including CBS News, remained unresolved as of 24 July.

Trump told Axios on 28 July that the US was in "deep conversations" with Iran, while Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the same day that Iran was conducting no negotiations, allowing only that mediators might be relaying messages .

Washington's actual moves stayed limited to what was already under way: the bombing pause in place since 25 July and a casualty-category rename reported days earlier, leaving a gap between rhetoric and action on both sides that Pentagon-beat outlets, CBS among them, kept testing story by story.