Alan Rappeport, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump’s signature will appear on U.S. dollars later this year, the Treasury Department said on Thursday. The decision to have Mr. Trump’s John Hancock on America’s paper currency represented an unprecedented change, one that the department said was being made in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary.

Mr. Trump is set to become the first sitting U.S. president to have his signature on the greenback. His name will appear alongside that of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As a result, the U.S. treasurer, whose name has been on the currency for more than a century, will not appear on the currency.

Raquel Coronell Uribe, reporting for NBC News:

Trump’s signature will go on the bills in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary, the Treasury said. Historically, paper currency carries the signatures of the treasury secretary and the treasurer.

“The President’s mark on history as the architect of America’s Golden Age economic revival is undeniable,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Printing his signature on the American currency is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”

It’s certainly news that the sitting president — a man whom psychologists have publicly described as showing clear “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder — malignant narcissism” — is putting his signature on U.S. currency. But why parrot the administration’s obviously false line that this gross, embarrassing change in longstanding tradition has anything whatsoever to do with “honoring” the United States’s 250th anniversary?

It makes no more sense that putting Trump’s signature on greenbacks “honors the nation” or its history than it would to claim that doing so will cure the common cold, reverse male pattern baldness, or keep us safe from Bigfoot. Call it what it is: sycophantic ego fellatio for a deeply unpopular narcissist who is losing his already tenuous grip on reality.

The New York Post (I’m not sure if I should tell you to take this with a grain of salt, because it’s the Post and their journalistic standards are low, or, to assign this extra credibility because it’s the Post, a right-wing Murdoch rag that Trump lackeys actually talk to):

President Trump is prioritizing taking control of the Strait of Hormuz as he grows frustrated with the lack of help from allies to force open the crucial waterway. And once Trump ends Iran’s reign of terror over the shipping route, he’s considering rechristening it the “Strait of America” or even naming it after himself, sources told The Post. [...]

Trump told a Saudi investor forum Friday evening in Miami that he might decide to call the Strait after himself, rather than America.

“They have to open up the Strait of Trump — I mean Hormuz,” Trump said. “Excuse me, I’m so sorry. Such a terrible mistake. The Fake News will say, ‘He accidentally said.’ No, there’s no accidents with me, not too many.”

I suspect there are going to be accidents soon, as he descends further into dementia and needs adult diapers.

Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

Apple Newsroom:

Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Ads on Maps builds on Apple’s broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.

The privacy angle is good. I don’t want to take that for granted, because few, if any, of Apple’s $1-trillion-plus market cap peers have such devotion to user privacy.

But more and more it’s becoming clear that while Apple’s devotion to protecting user privacy remains as high as ever, their devotion to delivering the best possible user experience does not. Here’s Apple’s own screenshot showing what these ads are supposedly going to look like. It looks fine. But these ads seem highly unlikely to make the overall experience of using Apple Maps better. Perhaps, in practice, they will not make the experience worse, and it’ll be a wash. But I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to make the experience worse, and the question is really just how much worse. The addition of ads to the App Store has made the experience worse.

We shall see. I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?