America
Fewest Murders in 126 Years • Crime in the United States continued to fall in 2025, with preliminary city data showing steep declines in homicides and other major offenses. The Major Cities Chiefs Association reported that 67 of 68 responding agencies recorded 5,452 homicides in 2025, down 19.3% from 6,758 in 2024, with robbery down 19.8%, aggravated assault down 9.7%, and rape down 8.8%. Separately, the Council
on Criminal Justice reported a 21% decline in homicides across 35 cities from 2024 to 2025 and said that if national figures follow a similar pattern, the U.S. homicide rate could fall to about four per 100,000 residents, the lowest recorded since at least 1900. The FBI has not
yet published the final nationwide 2025 annual figures, though its Crime Data Explorer reports that U.S. violent crime from December 2024 through November 2025 was down 10%, including an 18.2% drop in homicides.
Uber Launches Women’s App • Uber launched a feature to allow both women riders and drivers across the U.S. to be matched with other women for trips, expanding a pilot program aimed at addressing concerns about the safety of its ride-hailing platform. The feature allows
women to request a female driver through an option on the app called “Women
24 NEWSMAX | MAY 2026
Drivers.” Passengers can opt for
another ride if the wait for a woman is too long, and they can also reserve a trip with a woman driver in advance. A third option allows
female users to set a preference for a woman driver in their app settings, which would increase the chances of being matched with a female driver, though it would not guarantee it. Uber is also allowing its teen account users to request women drivers. Uber’s women
drivers can set the app’s preferences to request trips with female riders, and they can turn off that preference any time.
Amazon Phones It In Again • In 2014, Amazon introduced its first smartphone, hoping to take on Apple and Samsung. Instead, the Fire Phone — overseen directly by founder Jeff Bezos — was scrapped in a year, one of Amazon’s highest- profile flops. Now, Amazon is dialing
up a new phone. The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is seen as a mobile phone that can also sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon shopping. The new phone’s personalization features would make buying from
Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music, or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than
Columbus Discovers White House
T
he White House installed on its grounds a statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus as part of
President Donald Trump’s campaign against an “anti- American” ideology. “The statue is now residing on the north side of the
Eisenhower Executive Ofice Building,” Trump told the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations, who donated it to the government. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests after the
killing of George Floyd, several U.S. cities took down statues of the Italian navigator, whose Spanish-funded voyages from the 1490s onward paved the way for Europe’s conquests of the Americas. Trump called Columbus “the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth.”
ever, insiders said. A key focus of the Transformer project has been integrating artificial intelligence into the device. That could eliminate the need for traditional app stores, which require downloading and registering for applications before they can be used.
Texas Chip Factories • SpaceX and Tesla will build two advanced chip factories at a sprawling facility in Austin, Texas — one to power cars and humanoid robots, and another designed for AI data centers in space, CEO Elon Musk said. The comments followed
Musk’s announcement to build Terafab, an advanced AI chip complex in Austin. “Terafab will technically be two fabrication facilities, each making only one chip design,” Musk wrote in a post on X. SpaceX, which is
preparing for a public listing that could value the company at $1.75 trillion, recently merged with Musk’s social media and artificial intelligence firm xAI. “We either build the
Terafab, or we don’t have the chips,” Musk said, adding that current global chip production would meet only a small fraction of his companies’ future needs.
Briefly Noted
CELAL GUNES/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES
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