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President Donald Trump says he will be personally involved in the potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, with two enormous buyout offers on the table that risk further exacerbating U.S. media concentration. Netflix announced an $83 billion deal last week to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give the tech giant control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and rival streaming service HBO Max. Paramount Skydance then launched a hostile takeover bid worth $108 billion that would create a Hollywood behemoth and bring CBS News and CNN under the same roof, in addition to a host of other media properties. Paramount Skydance is controlled by the pro-Trump billionaires Larry Ellison and his son David; the takeover offer is also backed financially by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Media critics and anti-monopoly advocates have warned that both offers for Warner Bros. should be rejected by federal regulators, though the Trump administration has largely ended aggressive antitrust enforcement.
"We have these giant companies trying to take control of even more of what we watch, see, hear and read every day," says Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, two media reform organizations. He calls the media giants' efforts to woo Trump "a Mafia-type situation" and warns that previous media mega-mergers have been "disastrous" for workers, consumers and the businesses themselves.
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The Supreme Court will take up Trump-related cases in its new term, as well as cases dealing with gay and transgender issues and campaigns.
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The US president says European countries have failed to control migration or take decisive action to end Ukraine's war with Russia.
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The Trump administration is facing backlash after ending free admission at national parks on the only two federal holidays honoring Black history — Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day — while adding free entry on President Trump's birthday, June 14. The Interior Department also announced higher entry fees for non-U.S. residents under what it calls "America-first entry fee policies."
Denigrating Black history "can't erase the truth," says Carolyn Finney, who served on the National Parks Advisory Board during the Obama administration. "It's not going to change how we feel, not just as Black Americans, but Americans in general, about honoring our history."
We also speak with Audrey Peterman, author of Our True Nature: Finding a Zest for Life in the National Park System, who says "the entire history of America, the entire history of every racial and ethnic group in America, is in the national park system."
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The dispute before the court involved a Republican effort to lift limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
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A ruling in the president's favor in the case, which deals with his attempt to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission, would be a major expansion of presidential authority.
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The justices have indicated that they will try to find a way to protect the independence of the Fed, even as they let presidents remove leaders of other agencies.
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The longest U.S. federal government shutdown in history has entered its 43rd day. The House of Representatives is returning to session today to vote on a short-term funding bill to end the shutdown. The Senate approved the measure on Monday after seven Democrats and one independent backed the Republican bill even though the bill did not include an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies, which was a key demand for Democratic lawmakers. Some Democrats in the House are now calling for Senator Chuck Schumer to resign his position as minority leader — including Democratic congressmember from California, Ro Khanna. "The President was panicking," says Khanna. "He realized that he had lost the election over this. We caved too soon." Khanna also discusses his bill to force the public release of the Epstein files, surrounding the federal investigation into the serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
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