Multiple readers shared the following report about the executive departures at CISA: Virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government's lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating.

Five of CISA's six operational divisions and six of its 10 regional offices will have lost top leaders by the end of the month, the agency's new deputy director, Madhu Gottumukkala, informed employees in an email on Thursday. [...] The exits of these leaders could undermine the efficiency and strategic clarity of CISA's partnerships with critical infrastructure operators, private security firms, foreign allies, state governments and local emergency managers, experts say.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 2% of Americans are taking the blockbuster class of GLP-1 drugs for overweight or obesity, up nearly 600% over six years, according to a report from FAIR Health given to Axios first. The data from FAIR Health's repository of over 51 billion commercial healthcare claim records shows the explosion in use of the drugs specifically for weight loss -- roughly half of all users.

In all, roughly 4% of Americans were taking GLP-1 drugs in 2024 for either overweight, obesity or Type 2 diabetes (their original approved use). The data shows Novo Nordisk's Ozempic is still by far the most commonly taken GLP-1, followed by Eli Lilly's Mounjaro. The percentage of adults who were prescribed a GLP-1 drug but did not have bariatric surgery increased from 2.5% in 2019 to 11.2% in 2024 while the the percentage of adult patients who had bariatric surgery decreased 41.8%.

President Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on smartphone imports including iPhones would not provide enough economic incentive for Apple to relocate US-bound iPhone production to domestic facilities, according to a new Morgan Stanley note viewed by Slashdot. The tariff threat, announced Friday via social media, appeared to target Apple's recent shift of iPhone production from China to India through its contract manufacturing partners.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that establishing US iPhone production would require a minimum of two years and several billion dollars to build multiple greenfield assembly facilities, with a trained workforce exceeding 100,000 workers during peak seasons. More significantly, the firm calculates that a US-produced iPhone would cost 35% more than current China or India production, primarily due to higher labor costs and the need to import 25% of iPhone components from China under existing 30% tariffs. By contrast, Apple could offset a 25% import tariff by raising global iPhone prices just 4-6%, making domestic production economically unviable.

California's population grew 0.6% in 2024, adding nearly 250,000 residents to reach 39.43 million, according to Census Bureau estimates. The growth came entirely from a rebound in international immigration, which surged to over 300,000 people after plunging to 44,000 during the pandemic's worst year.

Without immigration, the state would have shrunk significantly as domestic migration remained negative. The H-1B visa program alone brought nearly 79,000 skilled workers to California in 2024. Since 2010, California has added 2.7 million immigrants, with half coming from Asia and slightly more than a third from Latin America. The immigration-dependent growth model puts California at particular risk from potential federal policy changes, as more than a quarter of its population is foreign-born -- the highest share nationwide.

alternative_right writes: The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries.

Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews.

The Federal Aviation Administration created the problem by relocating Newark's air traffic control operations from the understaffed N90 facility on Long Island to Philadelphia in 2024. Only 17 of 33 controllers accepted the move despite $100,000 relocation bonuses, leaving operations short-staffed. Rather than build new STARS servers in Philadelphia, the FAA opted to send radar data over 130 miles of commercial copper telephone lines.

The remote feeds have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime over 10 months -- exceeding the agency's reliability standards and occurring 200 times more frequently than the FAA's internal analysis predicted. The agency simultaneously laid off over 100 maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists in February, further straining an air traffic control system that suffers around 700 outages weekly nationwide while managing 16.8 million annual flights with 1990s-era technology.

In early 2025, U.S. solar power production jumped 44% compared to the previous year, driven by end-of-year construction to capture tax incentives and long-term cost advantages. "The bad news is that, in contrast to China, solar's growth hasn't been enough to offset rising demand," notes Ars Technica. "Instead, the US also saw significant growth in coal use, which rose by 23 percent compared to the year prior, after years of steady decline." From the report: Short-term fluctuations in demand are normal, generally driven by weather-induced demand for heating or cooling. Despite those changes, demand for electricity in the US has been largely flat for over a decade, largely thanks to gains in efficiency. But 2024 saw demand go up by nearly 3 percent, and the first quarter of 2025 saw another rise, this time of nearly 5 percent. It's a bit too early to say that we're seeing a shift to a period of rising demand, but one has been predicted for some time due to rising data center use and the increased electrification of transportation and appliances.

Under those circumstances, the rest of the difference will be made up for with fossil fuels. Running counter to recent trends, the use of natural gas dropped during the first three months of 2025. This means that the use of coal rose nearly as quickly as demand, up by 23 percent compared to the same time period in 2024. Despite the rise in coal use, the fraction of carbon-free electricity held steady year over year, with wind/solar/hydro/nuclear accounting for 43 percent of all power put on the US grid. That occurred despite small drops in nuclear and hydro production.

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened Apple with a 25% tariff unless the company manufactures iPhones sold in America domestically rather than in India or other overseas locations. Trump posted on Truth Social that he had "long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple" about his expectation for US-based iPhone production, warning that failure to comply would trigger the substantial tariff penalty.

The ultimatum follows Trump's expressed displeasure with Cook during his recent Middle East trip over Apple's plans to build iPhones at newly constructed Indian facilities. Apple has historically maintained that domestic iPhone manufacturing remains unfeasible due to insufficient skilled engineering talent and substantially higher production costs compared to Asian facilities.

An anonymous reader writes: The US Treasury is phasing out production of the penny and will stop putting new one-cent coins into circulation. The US Treasury has made its final order of penny blanks this month, and the mint will continue to manufacture pennies as long as its supply of penny blanks exist.

President Donald Trump stated that production of pennies are wasteful, as the coins cost more to produce than their one-cent value.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed in a new letter to Senate colleagues Wednesday that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile failed to create systems for notifying senators about government surveillance on Senate-issued devices -- despite a requirement to do so. From a report: Phone service providers are contractually obligated to inform senators when a law enforcement agency requests their records, thanks to protections enacted in 2020. But in an investigation, Wyden's staff found that none of the three major carriers had created a system to send those notifications.

"My staff discovered that, alarmingly, these crucial notifications were not happening, likely in violation of the carriers' contracts with the [Senate Sergeant at Arms], leaving the Senate vulnerable to surveillance," Wyden said in the letter, obtained first by POLITICO, dated May 21. Wyden said that the companies all started providing notification after his office's investigation. But one carrier told Wyden's office it had previously turned over Senate data to law enforcement without notifying lawmakers, according to the letter.

The U.S. trade deficit persists due to fundamental macroeconomic imbalances rather than just export shortfalls, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York economist Thomas Klitgaard. His analysis shows the deficit reflects a persistent gap between domestic saving and investment spending, with the U.S. borrowing from foreign sources to fund domestic investment when savings fall short.

This macroeconomic reality means targeting specific trade categories won't resolve the overall imbalance -- even when the petroleum deficit disappeared by 2019 due to increased domestic production, the total trade deficit grew to $441 billion, consistent with a widening saving gap.

Bureau of Economic Analysis data reveals household saving has remained below pre-pandemic levels as consumers spend down accumulated savings from 2020-21, while business saving has remained relatively stable. Reducing the deficit would require significant macroeconomic adjustments, including higher domestic saving or reduced investment spending, which studies indicate would likely cause economic pain as demonstrated during the 2008 recession.

Fortnite has returned to Apple's App Store in the United States after a nearly five-year absence, marking a significant victory for Epic Games in its protracted legal battle against Apple's App Store policies. The return follows an April 30 ruling where a federal judge determined Apple violated a court order requiring the company to allow greater competition for app downloads and payment methods, referring Apple to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney celebrated on X with a simple "We back fam" message. The game, which had 116 million users on Apple's platform before its 2020 removal, was banned after Epic challenged Apple's practice of charging up to 30% commission on in-app payments as anticompetitive.

Google today unveiled significant upgrades to its Gemini 2.5 AI models, introducing an experimental "Deep Think" reasoning mode for 2.5 Pro that allows the model to consider multiple hypotheses before responding. The new capability has achieved impressive results on complex benchmarks, scoring highly on the 2025 USA Mathematical Olympiad and leading on LiveCodeBench, a competition-level coding benchmark. Gemini 2.5 Pro also tops the WebDev Arena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1420.

"Based on Google's experience with AlphaGo, AI model responses improve when they're given more time to think," said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. The enhanced Gemini 2.5 Flash, Google's efficiency-focused model, has improved across reasoning, multimodality, and code benchmarks while using 20-30% fewer tokens. Both models now feature native audio capabilities with support for 24+ languages, thought summaries, and "thinking budgets" that let developers control token usage. Gemini 2.5 Flash is currently available in preview with general availability expected in early June, while Deep Think remains limited to trusted testers during safety evaluations.

America's regional state universities are experiencing steep enrollment declines, triggering economic crises in the towns that depend on them, while flagship universities continue to thrive.

At Western Illinois University in Macomb, enrollment has plummeted 47% since 2010, driving the city's population down 23% to 14,765. Empty dorms have been repurposed or demolished, while local businesses struggle to survive. "It's almost like you're watching the town die," Kalib McGruder, a 28-year veteran of the campus police department, told WSJ.

An analysis of 748 public four-year institutions reveals enrollment at prestigious state universities increased 9% between 2015 and 2023, while regional state schools saw a 2% decline. The University of Tennessee Knoxville's enrollment jumped 30% as the state's regional colleges collectively fell 3%. With high school graduate numbers expected to decline starting next year after reaching a record high in 2024, the outlook for struggling college towns appears bleak.

In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform stunned horse-racing fans by making a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But the next year its predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race just had an unusual cluster of obvious picks.)

Since then it's become almost a tradition — asking AI to predict the winning horses each year, then see how close it came. So before today's race, a horse named "Journalism" was given the best odds of winning by professional bookmakers — but could AI make a better prediction? USA Today reports: The USA TODAY Network asked Microsoft Copilot AI to simulate the order of finish for the 2025 Kentucky Derby field based on the latest, odds, predictions and race factors on Thursday, May 1. Journalism came out on top in its projection. The AI-generated response cited Journalism's favorable post position (No. 8), which has produced the second-most Kentucky Derby winners and a four-race winning streak that includes last month's Santa Anita Derby.
ChatGPT also picked the exact same horse, according to FanDuel. But in fact, the winning horse turned out to be "Sovereignty" (a horse Copilot predicted would finish second). Meanwhile Copilot's pick for first place ("Journalism") finished in second.

But after that Copilot's picks were way off...

• Copilot's pick for third place was a horse named Rodriguez — which hours later was scratched from the race altogether. (And the next day Copilot's pick for 10th place was also scratched.)

• Copilot's pick for fourth place was "Sandman" — who finished in 18th place.

• Copilot's pick for fifth place was "Burnham Square" — who finished in 11th place.

• Copilot's pick for sixth place was "Luxor Cafe" — who finished in 10th place

• Copilot's pick for seventh place was "Render Judgment" — who finished in 16th place...

An online racing publication also asked "a trained AI LLM tool" for their predictions, and received a wildly uneven prediction:

1. Burnham Square (finished 11th)
2. Journalism (finished 2nd)
3. Sandman (finished 18th)
4. Tiztastic (finished 15th)
5. Baeza (finished 3rd)

A new Star Wars movie — starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy — will be released in 2027, the two announced Friday at the "Star Wars Celebration" (a fan event in Japan). CNN reports: Set to begin production this fall, the movie will be set approximately five years after "Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker," released in 2019, but will sit outside the Skywalker story as a standalone film. "The film... is an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters set in a period of time that has not been explored on screen," said a statement from Lucasfilm, the owner of the "Star Wars" franchise...

"The script is just so good, the story, it has so much adventure, so much heart and original character. It's an opportunity to shine the light into a side of the universe that we may not have seen," Gosling said. Levy, the director of "Deadpool & Wolverine," told the crowd the film would have all the "fun of 'Star Wars'" but it would be done "in ways that are new and original...."

The next movie in the franchise, "The Mandalorian & Grogu," a spin-off of "The Mandalorian" series, directed by Jon Favreau, will hit cinemas in May 2026.
USA Today notes that more new Star Wars movies have also been announced: Daisy Ridley is set to star in a film that will see her character, Rey, building a new Jedi Order after the events of "The Rise of Skywalker." [This is sometimes referred to as "Star Wars Episode X: New Jedi Order."]

"Logan" filmmaker James Mangold has also been tapped to direct a movie about the dawn of the Jedi, and [Dave] Filoni is directing one said to "close out the interconnected stories" told in the live-action Disney+ shows like "The Mandalorian."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Robotaxi development is speeding at a fast pace in China, but we don't hear much about it in the USA, where the news focuses mostly on Waymo, with a bit about Zoox, Motional, May, trucking projects and other domestic players. China has 4 main players with robotaxi service, dominated by Baidu (the Chinese Google.) A recent session at last week's Ride AI conference in Los Angeles revealed some details about the different regulatory regime in China, and featured a report from a Chinese-American YouTuber who has taken on a mission to ride in the different vehicles.

Zion Maffeo, deputy general counsel for Pony.AI, provided some details on regulations in China. While Pony began with U.S. operations, its public operations are entirely in China, and it does only testing in the USA. Famously it was one of the few companies to get a California "no safety driver" test permit, but then lost it after a crash, and later regained it. Chinese authorities at many levels keep a close watch over Chinese robotaxi companies. They must get approval for all levels of operation which control where they can test and operate, and how much supervision is needed. Operation begins with testing with a safety driver behind the wheel (as almost everywhere in the world,) with eventual graduation to having the safety driver in the passenger seat but with an emergency stop. Then they move to having a supervisor in the back seat before they can test with nobody in the vehicle, usually limited to an area with simpler streets.

The big jump can then come to allow testing with nobody in the vehicle, but with full time monitoring by a remote employee who can stop the vehicle. From there they can graduate to taking passengers, and then expanding the service to more complex areas. Later they can go further, and not have full time remote monitoring, though there do need to be remote employees able to monitor and assist part time. Pony has a permit allowing it to have 3 vehicles per remote operator, and has one for 15 vehicles in process, but they declined comment on just how many vehicles they actually have per operator. Baidu also did not respond to queries on this. [...] In addition, Chinese jurisdictions require that the system in a car independently log any "interventions" by safety drivers in a sort of "black box" system. These reports are regularly given to regulators, though they are not made public. In California, companies must file an annual disengagement report, but they have considerable leeway on what they consider a disengagement so the numbers can't be readily compared. Chinese companies have no discretion on what is reported, and they may notify authorities of a specific objection if they wish to declare that an intervention logged in their black box should not be counted. On her first trip, YouTuber Sophia Tung found Baidu's 5th generation robotaxi to offer a poor experience in ride quality, wait time, and overall service. However, during a return trip she tried Baidu's 6th generation vehicle in Wuhan and rated it as the best among Chinese robotaxis, approaching the quality of Waymo.

America's Justice Department "has shut down its unit that investigates cryptocurrency fraud," reports USA Today.

A Monday night memo from U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the shut down was "effective immediately." Blanche directed the closure of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and ordered prosecutors to pivot to investigating transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups that use crypto to engage in illicit transactions... In his four-page memo, Blanche said the new order was meant to bring the Justice Department in line with Trump's own Executive Order 14178, which decreed that clarity and certainty regarding enforcement policy "are essential to supporting a vibrant and inclusive digital economy and innovation in digital assets." Blanche, one of several Trump criminal defense lawyers at the top ranks of DOJ, said the president "has also made clear that '[w]e are going to end the regulatory weaponization against digital assets'..."

Consistent with that narrowing of its cryptocurrency enforcement policy, the DOJ Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit will also cease cryptocurrency enforcement to focus on other administration priorities, including immigration and procurement fraud, Blanche said.
The Washington Post got this assessment from Yesha Yadav, a Vanderbilt University law professor who closely follows cryptocurrency and financial markets. "It's hard to underestimate the importance this task force has had ... in pursuing some really huge crypto hacks and cases."

More from USA Today: Public corruption and transnational crime experts warned that shutting down the unit could divert critical resources from efforts to stop criminals and corrupt regimes from using cryptocurrency for illicit gain, even as Trump claims he wants to crack down on them. "Dangerous US adversaries rely on cryptocurrencies to launder money and evade sanctions," said Nate Sibley, an anti-corruption expert and director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., in a post on X. "If this is accurate, hard to see how it squares with — for example-cracking down on cartel finances or maximum pressure sanctions on Iran...."

Trump's so-called "memecoin" surged from less than $10 on the Saturday before his inauguration to as high as $74.59 before eventually giving up some of its gains. The token, branded $TRUMP, has been criticized by ethics experts as a conflict of interest for the president since the company could likely benefit from his pro-crypto policies...

Last month, Trump signed an order to create a federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, signaling new federal support for cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin in particular.
Since the first-ever White House crypto summit in March, America's Securities and Exchange Commission "has dropped more than a dozen cases against crypto firms," notes the Washington Post: Last month, both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pledged to stop evaluating banks based on "reputational risk" — a practice that some venture capitalists have claimed unfairly "de-banked" founders of cryptocurrency start-ups.
In other news, executives from cryptocurrency exchange Binance "met with Treasury Department officials last month," reports the Wall Street Journal, asking them to remove a U.S. monitor overseeing their compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, according to people familiar with the talks.

The article adds that Binance is also concurrently "exploring" a deal with the Trump family to list its new dollar-pegged stablecoin which "could catapult it into a huge market and potentially bring in billions in profit for the family. "

An anonymous reader shares a report: Following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pause some of the exorbitant tariffs that he put in place earlier today, he spoke to the press at the White House and provided some commentary that could be a positive for Apple. When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. "As time goes by, we're going to take a look at it," he said. "There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we'll take a look at that," he added, claiming that he will "show a little flexibility."

[...] When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple "building" in China is unsustainable. "If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn't be doing that if I didn't do this. They'd just keep building them in China. And that's unsustainable," he said.

The U.S. Army told the government it had a lot of success using AI to "process targets" during a recent deployment. It said that it had used AI systems to identify targets at a rate of 55 per day but could get that number up to 5,000 a day with "advanced artificial intelligence tools in the future." 404 Media: The line comes from a new report from the Government Accountability Office -- a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates the federal government. The report is titled "Defense Command and Control" and is, in part, about the Pentagon's recent push to integrate AI systems into its workflow.

Across the government, and especially in the military, there has been a push to add or incorporate AI into various systems. The pitch here is that AI systems would help the Pentagon ID targets on the battlefield and allow those systems to help determine who lives and who dies. The Ukrainian and Israeli military are already using similar systems but the practice is fraught and controversial.