Extra, Extra
It’s Wooing or Suing: Following ABC’s $15 million settlement with Trump, the prez-elect is “escalating his legal campaign against media outlets by suing renowned pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register newspaper and its parent company Gannett.” Her crime: Posting her Iowa poll that showed Harris with an edge. Trump sues Des Moines Register and top pollster over final Iowa survey. As intended, even if Trump loses the suit, which he would if it went to trial, the cost of defending themselves will damage the Register, and make other organizations less likely to take risks. For smaller publishers, the suits could be existential. For big, corporate backed media players like ABC, parent companies won’t want to take big risks in news because those divisions are such a small part of their bottom lines. Josh Marshall explains: The Great Fluffening of 2024. “The key here is that it is almost absurd to expect that these big diversified corporations are going to operate in the interests of or run major risks on behalf of their very small news divisions. These are in almost every case liabilities in the context of a Trump administration.”
+ Place Setting: “While other Russian generals have died in occupied Ukraine or near the front line, he is the highest-ranking military official to have been killed inside Russia.” Ukraine Says It Killed General Who Led Russia’s Nuclear Defense Force.
+ Dialysis Boom Bah: “She volunteered to become the first living person in the world to get a kidney from a new kind of genetically modified pig. Scientists hope this kind of pig will someday provide an unlimited supply of kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs that could alleviate the chronic shortage of organs for transplantation and save thousands of patients every year.” A transplanted pig kidney offers a grandmother hope for life without dialysis.
+ Murder Rap: After a week of deliberations in a trial that riveted the Bay Area, a jury found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of tech exec Bob Lee. The incident was used by many people with big followings to push their pre-existing narratives about San Franciso (even though they didn’t know shit when they made these pronouncements).
+ You’re On Candid Camera: “Walmart, the largest nongovernmental employer in the U.S., is testing the technology after smaller retailers started trying body cameras at their own stores as a way to deter theft. Body cameras and the footage they gather are commonly advertised as a way to prevent shoplifting, but Walmart intends to use the tech for worker safety — not as a loss prevention tool, according to a person familiar with the program.” Walmart employees are now wearing body cameras in some U.S. stores.
+ Galling 911: “Police in the US state of Wisconsin say the emergency call they received over Monday’s school shooting came from a child no older than seven or eight years old.” In addition to that sad detail from another sad school shooting, it’s also unusual that in this case the shooter was a 15-year-old girl.
+ Emissionary Position: For the first time, researchers have shown that feeding seaweed to grazing cattle can reduce their methane emissions by almost 40%. (Interesting. Avoiding cow’s milk can reduce my menthane emissions by the exact same percentage.)
