In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign.

“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure.

Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on Tuesday when he said he would leave the highest-rated program in television news over disagreements with Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”

Mr. Owens’s comments were widely reported in the press last week. The show’s decision to repeat those grievances on-air may have exposed viewers to the serious tensions between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers for the first time.

Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, has been intent on securing approval from the Trump administration for a multibillion-dollar sale of her media company to a studio run by the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire.

President Trump sued CBS last year, claiming $10 billion in damages, in a case stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Trump said was deceptively edited. Ms. Redstone has expressed her desire to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, although legal experts have called the case far-fetched.

In his remarks on Sunday night’s telecast, Mr. Pelley presented Mr. Owens’s decision to resign as an effort to protect “60 Minutes” from further interference.

“He did it for us and you,” Mr. Pelley told viewers of the show, which began airing in 1968. “Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial — lately, the Israel-Gaza War and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.”

After “60 Minutes” ran a segment in January about the war between Israel and Hamas, Ms. Redstone complained to CBS executives about what she considered the segment’s unfair slant. A day later, CBS appointed a veteran producer to a new role involving journalistic standards. She reviewed certain “60 Minutes” segments that were deemed sensitive.

Representatives for Mr. Trump and for Paramount are involved in settlement talks, and mediation is expected to start this week.

Mr. Pelley’s on-air monologue on Sunday night evoked a previous moment of public discord between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers.

In 1995, also in a closing note to viewers, the correspondent Mike Wallace said on air that the program had chosen not to broadcast an interview with a former tobacco industry executive because managers at CBS News had given in to legal pressure. “60 Minutes” ultimately aired the interview, and the episode was later dramatized in “The Insider,” a 1999 movie starring Al Pacino as Lowell Bergman, a “60 Minutes” producer.

Sunday’s “60 Minutes” episode also featured a segment that examined the Trump administration’s decision to reduce funding to the National Institutes of Health, including an interview with a former director who expressed his concerns about adverse effects on Americans’ health.

Lauren Hirsch contributed reporting.

President Trump’s shake-up of the global trade system has sent tremors through the long-held view that the United States is the source of the world’s safest financial assets. That’s created an opportunity for Europe.

The market tumult in which investors simultaneously sold off the U.S. dollar, American stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds eased last week as Mr. Trump backed off his threats to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure foreign officials that trade deals would be struck.

But many European officials attending the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington last week were skeptical that the uncertainty over Mr. Trump’s trade policy would dissipate any time soon. They said the unpredictable nature of the Trump administration’s approach to setting policy would not easily be forgotten. Instead, they saw the potential to attract investors to European assets, from the euro to the bond market.

“We see that our stability, predictability and respect for the rule of law is already proving a strength,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner responsible for the trade bloc’s economy, said on Wednesday in a discussion on the sidelines of the I.M.F. meetings. “We already have stronger investor interest in euro-denominated assets.”

The most comprehensive indication that funds are flowing to Europe: Since the beginning of April, the euro has gained 5.4 percent against the dollar, rising above $1.13, the highest level since late 2021.

The question among policymakers and investors is whether the recent jump in the euro and other euro-denominated assets is simply a short-term rebalancing of portfolios that heavily favored the dollar or the beginning of a long-term trend in which the euro firmly encroaches on the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant currency.

A troubled past

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm about Europe,” Kristin J. Forbes, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an interview.

She said the excitement about the euro reminded her of the currency’s founding in 1999, when some economists and policymakers raised the prospect of it replacing the dollar. In its early years, the euro’s international use exceeded the combined use of the currencies it replaced.

But then the euro was hit by crises. Despite having a monetary union of a dozen members, including Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the region remained politically fragmented, sapping confidence in the currency. The sovereign debt crisis in 2012, followed by a decade of ultra low interest rates, meant the region’s bonds offered low returns.

The euro is now used by 20 member countries and represents about 20 percent of the world’s central banks foreign exchange reserves, a figure that has barely budged in the past two decades. Thirty percent of global exports are invoiced in euros, whereas more than half are in dollars.

Speculation about new dominant currencies should be taken “cautiously,” Ms. Forbes said, but there is more momentum behind the euro.

“This feels like it does have more legs because it is a combination of a stronger, more unified Europe,” she said. “At the same time, there are more problems emerging with U.S. dollar assets.”

Improvements have been made on some of the issues that previously deterred foreign investors. Today, European bonds are providing better returns, and investors trust that the European Central Bank will be the lender of last resort, minimizing the risk that one country’s economic troubles could affect all euro assets.

More safe assets

For investors, the most promising new development is the prospect of Germany issuing about 1 trillion euros in additional government debt, known as bunds and considered the safest euro-denominated assets.

For years, Germany’s strict fiscal conservatism has restrained the supply of bunds. But last month, Parliament altered the borrowing limits anchored in its constitution, the so-called debt brake, to allow the government to borrow hundreds of millions of euros to invest in the military and infrastructure.

“There are cheers in Europe” because of Germany’s fiscal stimulus, said Kristalina Georgieva, the I.M.F. managing director. “And it adds something that is not tangible, but it is important — confidence.”

The demand for German debt has preceded any additional issuance. During the recent market turmoil, bund prices rose, pushing down the yields, a clear sign of investor interest. At the same time, yields on U.S. government bonds have moved in the other direction. By the end of last week, the yield on 10-year bunds was 2.47 percent, reversing nearly all the increase that followed the stimulus announcement.

Investors are also anticipating an increase in debt issued jointly by European governments, an idea that has been proposed to finance more military spending across the bloc. Economists have pointed out that this happened before: The European Union issued more than 600 billion euros in bonds to finance post-pandemic recovery programs. But that borrowing faced fierce opposition, and future issuance would also struggle to win the backing of all the member states.

Although there has been confusion and frustration with the Mr. Trump’s trade policies, many European officials, including central bankers, emphasized the need for Europe to seize this moment.

“This will be a time of creativity and pragmatism, getting things moving,” Olli Rehn, the governor of the Finnish central bank, said in a speech. “I am very much looking forward to this period as a positive challenge because we are very serious about reinforcing common defense in Europe. Which will, by the way, need safe assets.”

‘A long and hard road’

Optimism is growing about the role of the euro. Klaas Knot, the governor of the Dutch central bank, said he had gone from being agnostic about the international use of the euro to a “cautious believer.”

But he added that “the external strength” of the euro “is a reflection of internal strength” in Europe, and governments need to go further to increase that strength, he said in a speech on the sidelines of the meetings in Washington.

Officials must continue to deepen the single market that connects the bloc’s more than 448 million people and enable them to trade and do businesses freely, Mr. Knot said. Lawmakers, he said, also needed to build a single capital market that would make it easier for money to cross European borders. “We still have quite some work to do in Europe.”

Alfred Kramer, the director of the I.M.F.’s European department, warned against “over-interpreting” the recent shift toward the euro. A “move to European exceptionalism,” he said, is “still a long and hard road away.”

The region, he said, needed many more structural changes that would enable a more dynamic business sector in which companies could reach larger markets and pools of capital.

Many officials said it was more likely that the euro would be one of several assets that become more prominent as investors reduce their holdings in dollars. In recent weeks, for example, the price of gold has soared, exceeding $3,300 per troy ounce, and the Swiss franc has also surged, gaining nearly 7 percent against the dollar this month.

“I don’t see everyone massively getting out of dollars and suddenly shifting to the euro; I think it’s more a healthy diversification,” Ms. Forbes said. But private investors abroad who have built up a lot of holdings in U.S. debt and are now watching the dollar decline want alternatives.

“Europe,” she added, “is a natural place to diversify.”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

Two weeks ago, a three-judge panel from the federal appeals court in Washington lifted a freeze on firing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with some conditions. The judges, ruling on a Friday night, said that workers could be fired if agency leaders determined, after a careful assessment, that they were not needed to carry out the bureau’s legally required responsibilities.

Within hours, Trump administration officials — working closely with Elon Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency — scurried to fire nearly all the agency’s employees. By the following Thursday afternoon, bureau leaders sent termination notices to nearly 1,500 employees, retaining barely 200 people, and ordered that the fired workers’ access to agency systems be shut down the next day.

A judge has again stopped the cuts for now. But the details of what happened at the agency, which oversees banks and lenders and enforces consumer protection laws, will be vital to determining if the firings can proceed. Hundreds of pages of newly released agency records, supplemented by narrative accounts filed in court by more than 20 agency employees, were submitted ahead of a hearing this week before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington.

Judge Jackson halted the planned firings less than a day after the notices went out, saying that they went far beyond what the appeals court had allowed. Starting Tuesday, she will hold a two-day hearing to take witness testimony and decide whether to extend her order blocking the firings.

The consumer bureau has been on life support since February, when Trump officials arrived at the agency and began dismantling it. A series of federal court rulings prohibited the agency’s destruction. Congress created the agency in 2011 to add safeguards around mortgages and other consumer financial products, and only Congress has the power to abolish it.

Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer and the mastermind behind the termination plan, defended the firings, saying in a legal filing that they would “right-size” an agency filled with “vast waste.” Russell Vought, the White House budget office director who also serves as the bureau’s acting director, has called the bureau a “woke and weaponized” agency.

But firing so many workers at once, with no transition period, would destroy the bureau’s ability to operate, employees warned their bosses in emails, chat messages and verbal conversations, according to court records. Within days, critical technical systems would fail, enforcement lawyers would miss court deadlines and agency data that federal courts had ordered be preserved would be lost, they said.

“I don’t think we can keep operating even for 60 days without keeping many of these folks,” Christopher Chilbert, the bureau’s chief information officer, wrote in an email the day the terminations were announced.

Adam Martinez, the agency’s chief operating office, responded: “Understood and I do not disagree. We will really need to spend the next week figuring out a path forward.”

Judge Jackson has asked for the testimony of Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old associate of Mr. Musk’s who carried out the terminations.

Mr. Kliger, a former Twitter summer intern who had no experience in government work before this year, joined the Office of Personnel Management in January as a senior adviser. He has carried out assignments for Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in at least nine agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, where he is said to have been recently ousted from.

Emails sent in the hours after the appeals court ruled that staff cuts could move forward show Mr. Musk’s officials scrambling to fire people as quickly as possible — at times moving so fast they appeared to forget which agency they were focused on.

Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old lawyer who leads DOGE’s State Department foreign aid actions, sent an email on Saturday from his U.S. Agency for International Development email address laying the groundwork for the reduction in force, the government’s version of a layoff. In a nod to specific language in the appellate court’s order, Mr. Lewin wrote, “Director Vought’s team and I will conduct an individualized assessment to, consistent with the DC Circuit’s stay, ensure that only nonstatutory positions are affected.”

Mr. Paoletta said in court filings that he worked with two other lawyers to conduct a unit-by-unit evaluation of the consumer bureau and determined that the bureau could function without 90 percent of its current staff.

“An approximately 200-person agency allows the bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy,” he said.

But emails and other agency records show that up until nearly the moment the termination notices were sent, bureau officials were still debating the numbers. On the Tuesday before the notices went out, some workers trying to prepare materials believed 485 workers would remain.

Trump officials wanted those slated for termination to be cut off from the agency’s systems less than 24 hours after receiving their layoff notice. One human resources worker involved in the planning asked a manager how people who were traveling and unable to check their email before losing access would be notified of their firing.

“Many people have asked that question. No one making decisions really cares,” the manager responded. “It makes me sad.”

In legal declarations totaling more than 100 pages, department heads — who said they were not consulted by the Trump officials before the firings — and other workers depicted the terminations as reckless and riddled with errors.

The one person Mr. Paoletta left in the Office of Servicemember Affairs, a legally required unit that aids military workers, had already accepted the government’s deferred resignation offer and would be retiring in September. He had turned in his work equipment and lost access to agency systems, workers said — meaning the office would be unstaffed if the firings proceeded.

The head of another legally required department said that he and all of his workers had received termination notices, despite Mr. Paoletta’s testimony that one worker had been retained.

“If there is such a person, that person has not reached out to me or, to my knowledge, to anyone else in my office to understand how we fulfill our statutory mandate,” the department head said.

Days before the Titanic struck an iceberg, a first-class passenger, Col. Archibald Gracie, described the vessel in a letter written while on board: “It is a fine ship but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her.”

Colonel Gracie’s journey on the Titanic had a catastrophic end, but he fared better than most.

He was on the top deck of the ship, gripping a railing, as it plunged into the sea. He said he was “swirled” under water before he got to a raft, where he spent hours floating on icy waters before being rescued.

The letter he wrote was sold on Saturday at an auction for $399,000 (or 300,000 pounds), according to Henry Aldridge and Son, an auction house in Wiltshire, England.

The auction house said the letter, written in neat, cursive handwriting, was addressed to an unidentified European ambassador, the great-uncle of the seller. The letterhead shows a triangular red flag with a white star and is printed with the words “On board R.M.S. Titanic.”

The letter was dated April 10, 1912, the day the ship set sail from Southampton, England. On April 12, it was postmarked in London, where it was received at the Waldorf Hotel. The Titanic struck an iceberg just before midnight on April 14 and sank the next day.

The buyer of the letter was based in the United States, according to Andrew Aldridge, the managing director of Henry Aldridge and Son. The auction house did not publicly identify the buyer or the seller.

Mr. Aldridge said in an email that the stories of the ship’s passengers “are told through the memorabilia” and that “their memories are kept alive through those items.”

The auction house had initially expected the letter to sell for up to 60,000 pounds, or nearly $80,000.

Colonel Gracie, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was a high-profile survivor of the Titanic disaster, in which about 1,500 people perished.

He died eight months later, in December 1912, of complications from diseases, but his doctors and his family said that the real cause was that he had never recovered from the shock of the Titanic disaster, according to The New York Times.

After Colonel Gracie was rescued, he began work on “The Truth About the Titanic,” a book about his experience that was published posthumously. The New York Times review of the book said “there is something effective in the very lack of directness and coherency in the narrative.”

Colonel Gracie said in an interview with The New York Tribune that he had been on the top deck of the ship when it was hit by a wave that sent other people overboard. He managed to stay on and grabbed a brass railing.

“When the ship plunged down, I was forced to let go, and I was swirled around and around for what seemed an interminable time,” he said. “Eventually I came to the surface to find the sea a mass of tangled wreckage.”

He said he grabbed a wooden grating and then saw a canvas-and-cork raft. He made it onto the raft and began trying to rescue others. They eventually reached a rescue ship, R.M.S. Carpathia.

“The hours that elapsed before we were picked up by the Carpathia were the longest and most terrible that I ever spent,” Colonel Gracie said, according to The Tribune. “Practically without any sensation of feeling because of the icy water, we were almost dropping from fatigue.”

Colonel Gracie was an established figure in New York and Washington society.

His father had been an officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Colonel Gracie was also a descendant of Archibald Gracie, who built the New York City mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, in 1799.

After news of the Titanic’s sinking reached the United States, and it was not known whether Colonel Gracie had survived, his wife, Constance Schack Gracie, was reported missing for unrelated reasons.

Mrs. Gracie had not been on the ship, but had left town to avoid being subpoenaed in the lunacy trial of another society woman, Mary E. Gage, according to The New York Times.

In the days after the Titanic disaster, the Gracies’ daughter, Edith Gracie, was asked about the whereabouts of her mother, which she said she did not know, and about the fate of her father, The Times reported.

She said Colonel Gracie had been in Europe recuperating from an operation and had said in a letter that he would return home with a much stronger constitution.

“It is too terrible to think of,” she said, “but I am hoping against hope that he has come through the perils of the accident without harm.”