Business news in brief

By The Associated Press

Trump announces more job picks

WASHINGTON | President-elect Donald Trump has made another flurry of job announcements. He said Tuesday that he had selected Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Kimberly Guilfoyle as the ambassador to Greece and Tom Barrack as the ambassador to Turkey.

Ferguson is already one of the FTC’s five commissioners and will replace Lina Khan. She became a lightning rod for Wall Street and Silicon Valley by blocking billions of dollars’ worth of corporate acquisitions and suing Amazon and Meta while alleging anticompetitive behavior.

Guilfoyle became engaged to Don Trump Jr. in 2020, and Tom Barrack is a longtime friend who was also the former Trump inaugural chair.

Albertsons sues Kroger for failing to win approval of proposed merger

Kroger and Albertsons’ plan for the largest U.S. supermarket merger in history has crumbled. The two companies have accused each other of not doing enough to push their proposed alliance through, and Albertsons pulled out of the $24.6 billion deal on Wednesday.

The bitter breakup came the day after a federal judge in Oregon and a state judge in Washington issued injunctions to block the merger, saying that combining the two grocery chains could reduce competition and harm consumers. Albertsons is now suing Kroger, seeking a $600 million termination fee, as well as billions of dollars in legal fees and lost shareholder value. Kroger says the legal claims are “baseless.”

Google forges ahead with its next generation of AI technology

SAN FRANCISCO | Google has unleashed another wave of artificial intelligence. It’s designed to tackle more of the work and thinking done by humans as it tries to stay on technology’s cutting edge while also trying to fend off regulatory threats to it internet empire.

The next generation of Google’s AI is being packaged under the Gemini umbrella unveiled a year ago. Google is framing its release of Gemini 2.0 as a springboard for AI agent built to interpret images shown through a smartphone, perform a variety of tedious chores, remember the conversations they have with people, help video game players plot strategy and even tackle the task of doing online searches.

—From AP reports