Recode Daily: The Russian investigation gets a special counsel — former FBI director Robert Mueller

The Russia investigation is getting a special counsel: The U.S. Justice Department appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee its multiple investigations. And the Senate Intelligence Committee invited recently fired former FBI director James Comey to tell his side of the story. [The New York Times]

Android is on more than two billion active devices, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the company’s annual I/O developers conference; he also announced a new version of the mobile OS called Android O. Here’s everything important that Google announced today, from in-photo search to immersive computing; you can watch Pichai’s keynote here. [Tess Townsend]

Cisco Systems is cutting 1,100 more jobs after it forecast current-quarter revenue that widely missed analysts’ estimates. The world’s largest maker of networking gear slashed 5,500 jobs last August in its quest to transform into a software-focused company. [Reuters]

Washington, D.C., is replacing traditional taxi meters with Square’s payments platform and third-party apps to make it easier for cab drivers to compete with Uber and Lyft. [Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg]

A New York startup called Slice raised $15 million to help mom-and-pop pizzerias fight back against Domino’s digital dominance by converting from phone ordering to online ordering. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

The publisher of Macworld, PCworld and Computerworld laid off more than 90 people in its flagship tech-industry division. IDG, which stopped printing its tech magazines in 2013 and switched to a web-only format, was sold to China Oceanwide Holdings Group for less than $1 billion two months ago. [Curt Woodward / Boston Globe]

News publishers can and should charge for news, says Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information, on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “People will pay for things that are valuable to them,” says Lessin, whose subscription site charges $400 a year for deeply reported tech and business news. [Eric Johnson / Recode]

Top stories from Recode

Google’s updates to its photos app walk the line between useful and creepy.

Let Google do the work of sharing.

Here’s how to find all the topics Twitter and its advertisers think you’re interested in.

Twitter now stores your web-browsing data for 30 days to “improve and personalize” the ads and content it shows you.

Facebook wants to know why teens are using group video app Houseparty

The social giant issued a survey earlier this year trying to figure out why teens use group video apps. Could it clone the app?

Facebook is trying yet again to cut clickbait headlines from your News Feed.

But this update may not hurt publishers as much as before.

The next looming battle in the tech world will be based around digital assistants.

Like Google Assistant, which is moving to iOS to take on Siri, digital assistants may completely devalue the platforms they run on.

This is cool

The act you’ve known for all these years

The Beatles’ landmark album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” will turn 50 on June 1. To commemorate the golden anniversary, the BBC has produced a video series about each of the more than 60 iconic people on the cover. [Mark Frauenfelder / BoingBoing]

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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