Top Stories; DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud over secret funding of extremist groups
Top Stories — Wednesday, April 22, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud over secret funding of extremist groups — CNBC
- Apple incoming CEO John Ternus faces a defining challenge: Fixing the company's AI strategy — CNBC
- Apple's elevation of silicon head Johny Srouji signals sprint to build in-house chips for all devices — CNBC
DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud over secret funding of extremist groups
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 4:04:29 AM
The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced a bombshell 11-count fraud indictment accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center of secretly funding white supremacist and other hate groups that the civil rights group claimed to be battling.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals, some of whom were associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and the America Front, said Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche at a press conference.
"The SPLC was not dismantling the groups," said Blanche, as FBI Director Kash Patel stood at his side. "It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
"One troubling example, is the SPLC was paying a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of one person, and injured dozens more," the acting attorney general said, noting that the indictment alleged that the group paid the person about $270,000 over the course of eight years.
The indictment was returned Tuesday by a grand jury in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Alabama, Blanche said.
The SPLC, which is a non-profit civil rights group, is charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of money laundering, he said.
"The indictment alleges a very long period of time, up to 2023," Blanche said.
The SPLC earlier Tuesday said it was the subject of a criminal probe by the DOJ, and that the focus of the probe appeared to be on the group's prior use of paid, confidential informants "to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups."
The group's interim CEO, Bryan Fair, in a statement responding to Blanche's press conference, said, "We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive.
"Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives," Fair said.
"SPLC will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work; we will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to envision and create a safer and more just world," he said.
FBI Director Patel in October said the FBI would sever ties with the SPLC, calling it a "partisan smear machine."
Apple incoming CEO John Ternus faces a defining challenge: Fixing the company's AI strategy
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 4:04:27 AM
Apple has maintained its dominance in consumer devices and built up a $4 trillion market cap despite largely sitting on the sidelines of the artificial intelligence boom. But investors won't remain patient forever, and they'll be looking to new CEO John Ternus for a clearer strategy when it comes to playing in the hottest market on the planet.
Tim Cook's 15-year tenure as Apple CEO comes to an end on Sept. 1, the company announced on Monday. Ternus, Apple's longtime hardware boss, is taking over, becoming just the second leader since Steve Jobs departed in 2011, less than two months before he died from cancer.
As Cook exits, Apple faces numerous challenges, including an intricate supply chain that's complicated by geopolitical tensions and soaring prices for memory due to unprecedented demand from the AI buildout. But for Ternus, perhaps the most critical aspect of his new job will be pushing the company deeper into AI, where it's lagged many of its megacap peers.
So far, Apple's AI strategy has involved avoiding hefty capital expenditures while Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta commit to hundreds of billions of dollars a year in combined capex to fund new data centers and fill them with pricey AI chips. When it comes to developing a foundational AI model, Apple has punted there as well, and is instead counting on Google's Gemini to power its AI features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year following a delay.
In 2024, Apple launched Apple Intelligence, which includes image generators, text rewriters, the ability to summarize push notifications and an integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Consumer response has been mixed, but Apple continues to sell boatloads of iPhones, and users are getting plenty of AI options on those devices —just from other companies.
ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude are currently the two most popular free iOS apps, with Gemini at fourth and Meta AI at eighth. Meanwhile, Apple is betting that within a few years, hefty workloads will run on a chip inside the phone, which will play to its strengths as the company has been integrating AI-capable silicon into its devices since 2017.
"By choosing a hardware leader in John Ternus, Apple may be signaling that it still believes the future of AI will run through tightly integrated devices, not just software," said Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame.
For the moment, Apple is getting plenty of growth from iPhone sales. In the latest quarter, iPhone revenue surged 23% from a year earlier to $85.3 billion, a jump the company attributed to strong sales of the iPhone 17 models released in September.
Cook said at the time that iPhone demand was "simply staggering." The company is scheduled to report fiscal second-quarter results next week. Cook will still be CEO for that report, but investors will have plenty of questions directed at Ternus and where he sees Apple headed.
AI-enabled hardware appears to be where the market is going through some combination of wearables, robotics, spatial computing or possibly something Apple hasn't shown yet. In January, Bloomberg reported that Apple will be accelerating the development of three upcoming AI wearables all built around Siri: smart glasses, a pendant and AirPods with cameras.
Apple is also expecting to introduce a foldable phone, which Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, called "the most consequential hardware moment in years."
"I think the biggest question is what comes after the iPhone," Bajarin told CNBC in March. "These are mature categories and we have no idea what comes after that but we do know it will be some form of AI hardware."
Ternus, 50, will also face the challenge of pushing AI in the services area of Apple's business, where the company relies on iPhone users paying for subscriptions to AppleCare, iCloud, Apple TV+ service, and using Apple Pay. When consumers upgrade to paid versions of ChatGPT, Claude and other generative AI services and chatbots, Apple gets a cut.
Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee said that in the coming years, "the seas will be turbulent for Apple because there's been so much change in how consumers interact with technology," particularly with generative AI.
Ternus will also have to decide whether the company continues with its emphasis on privacy, or whether it embraces AI-driven personalization. For Cook, Apple's privacy-first approach to user data has long been a differentiator compared to other tech giants like Meta and Google, which specialize in letting brands target users with ads.
Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management told CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Monday that his firm recently bought more apple stock due to its prospects in "personalized AI."
"There's an opportunity for Apple to tell a story to investors that could be quite compelling that they're going to get this," Munster said.
Nowhere in Monday's press release announcing the CEO shift did Apple mention AI. Rather, the sections on Ternus focused on his 25 years at the company and his instrumental role in "the introduction of multiple new product lines, including iPad and AirPods, as well as many generations of products across iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch."
But it's clear that when the Ternus era begins in a little over four months, AI will have to be front and center. And Notre Dame's Hubbard said Apple is going to have to return to its roots, at least when it comes to innovating.
"The very strengths that made Apple dominant — that rapid innovation is where Apple started, and maybe that's where the company needs to return," Hubbard said.
—CNBC's Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Apple's elevation of silicon head Johny Srouji signals sprint to build in-house chips for all devices
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 3:58:30 AM
In naming hardware boss John Ternus as its new CEO on Monday, Apple also announced another key promotion that may be almost as significant in gauging the company's direction.
Taking over for Ternus as head of hardware will be Johny Srouji, who leads the team that makes Apple's in-house chips. Apple created a new title for Srouji, chief hardware engineer, that's effective immediately. Ternus will become CEO on Sept. 1.
Ternus and Srouji make for a formidable pair as Apple marches toward in-house development of all of its chips for iPhones, Macs, AirPods and more. It's a strategy, years in the works, that allows Apple to tightly integrate hardware and software and develop the specific features it needs, while avoiding unnecessary use of precious compute power, the two execs told CNBC in 2023.
"Because we're not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product and that gives us freedom to optimize," Srouji said at the time. "And the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products."
In December, Srouji dismissed rumors that he was planning to leave as several other executives were exiting. His new role underscores Apple's commitment to a silicon strategy that's poised to assume increased significance as artificial intelligence gains greater prominence on devices. Under Srouji's leadership, Apple started making more types of chips, reducing reliance on outsiders like Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom.
While Ternus has, for months, been viewed as the frontrunner to replace Cook, who turned 65 in November, locking in Srouji is viewed by many analysts as an equally critical move.
"We believe putting Srouji in the newly created Chief Hardware Officer role is the most incrementally positive announcement from Apple," analysts from Oppenheimer wrote in a report on Tuesday. "Apple not only retains one of the world's best chip designers, but also ensures its integrated silicon/hw/sw playbook is reserved and enhanced."
Following stints at Intel and IBM, Srouji joined Apple in 2008, less than a year after the company launched the first iPhone with a core processor made by Samsung. A month after Srouji arrived at Apple, the company bought chip startup P.A. Semiconductor for $278 million, and was off to the races.
Srouji and his team launched Apple's first custom processors for iPhones in 2010. Custom silicon is now one of the hottest trends in tech, as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla have all turned inward for AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia's scarce and costly graphics processing units.
When it comes to cloud workloads, Apple relies on Google's tensor processing units (TPUs), instead of Nvidia's chips.
In the 2023 interview with CNBC, Ternus said the "most profound change at Apple" in his more than two decades at the company was "how we now do so many of those technologies in house, and top of the list of course is our silicon."
"We've always had an incredible design team and we made these beautiful products, but they were constrained by what was available," Ternus said.
One of Apple's biggest supply chain efforts in Cook's latter years was to start onshoring production.
All the tech giants primarily manufacture their chips at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s fabrications plants in Asia, and at TSMC's new fabs in Arizona. Nvidia recently dethroned Apple as TSMC's biggest customer.
Apple's growing chip prowess includes a major commitment to manufacture at TSMC's Arizona campus — and at Texas Instruments' two new U.S. factories.
As part of a $600 billion U.S. investment commitment through 2029, Apple said in August that it's "leading the creation of an end-to-end silicon supply chain in the United States."
Apple execs told CNBC in 2023 that its chip team had scaled to thousands of engineers working across chip labs all over the world, including in Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K., Japan and the U.S.
While Apple doesn't currently make data center chips for running AI workloads in the cloud, some analysts predict it may partner with Broadcom on a server chip as soon as this year.
To date, Apple has focused almost entirely on AI capabilities on the end device, an approach the company says gives its users and their data top-notch security and privacy.
"Their goal is to continue to be the best place to run AI software, and everybody who tests or runs AI stuff on Apple silicon continues to say they're the best," said Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies.
Apple's key in-house chips are the M-series processors for Macs, which replaced Intel processors starting in 2020, and its A-series chips at the heart of iPhones. Both are known as systems-on-a-chip, or SoCs. When Apple unveiled its latest A19 and M5 generations in 2025, they included built-in neural accelerators for powering AI on the device.
Srouji said in 2023 that Apple has an advantage in AI because "we own the silicon, the hardware, the software, the machine learning all in one team."
The company says it builds neural accelerators into each GPU core, allowing developers to more quickly switch between different tasks. Apple announced its original neural engine for AI in 2017.
When it comes to modems, Apple began moving away from Qualcomm in 2019 with the purchase of the majority of Intel's modem business for $1 billion, following the settling of a series of lawsuits with Qualcomm.
Apple quietly released its first iPhone modem, the C1, in early 2025, and unveiled the C1X in the iPhone 19 in September. Bajarin predicts all iPhone modems will be made by Apple by the end of next year.
"If they never catch up to Qualcomm in performance, I don't think that's a deal-breaker even on Pro phones," Bajarin said. "I think it just needs to work well for your coverage area, be fast enough and not kill your battery."
In September, Apple launched its own wireless chip for the iPhone, the N1, replacing Broadcom. The networking chips in AirPods and Apple Watches have been made by Apple for nearly a decade.
Still, Apple will continue to rely on outsiders for plenty of smaller chips. It licenses the architecture for its key processors from Arm Holdings, and other technologies from Broadcom and Qualcomm. It relies on memory from Samsung and analog chips from makers like Texas Instruments.
Srouji told Apple employees in an email on Monday that he will bring hardware development under one umbrella, instead of it being divided between engineering and technology. Srouji said he'll organize hardware into five teams: hardware engineering, silicon, advanced technologies, platform architecture and project management.
Tim Millet, who was tapped to lead platform architecture, told CNBC in an interview in September that in-house chips are "where the magic is."
"When we have control, we are able to do things beyond what we can do by buying a merchant silicon part," he said.
For Apple, the changes at the top come as Wall Street questions the company's AI strategy and whether it's made the right bet in focusing on the device and not the cloud. The company's stock price is down 2% this year, trailing all of its megacap peers other than Microsoft and Tesla.
CNBC's interview with Ternus and Srouji took place in December of 2023, about a year after OpenAI released ChatGPT, kicking off the generative AI boom.
When asked by CNBC at the time to respond to concerns that Apple appeared to be falling behind in AI, Srouji said, "I don't believe we are."
Ternus added, with a laugh, that he was, "not too worried."
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