FDA loses two leaders in one week as Ebola outbreak draws WHO emergency declaration
The FDA's leadership vacuum deepened this week as the drug center head followed Commissioner Makary out the door, leaving the agency with no confirmed leadership at its two most critical posts. Open-weight models kept multiplying with Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, and Kimi K2.6 all dropping in the same month, while Sebastian Raschka's analysis of new KV-sharing and compressed attention techniques explains why long-context costs are falling fast. A rare Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Congo's Ituri province prompted a WHO public health emergency declaration, and the WHO's move landed as hantavirus conspiracy theories were already cycling through social media. On the economy side, Trump's China visit produced mixed signals on decoupling, while Noah Smith argued that Europe's comfortable stagnation is no longer viable.
May 17, 2026