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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
Dan Slepien
Where was she? The disappearance of Carrie Farmer was quite unlike any other. Beyond diabolical, beyond the macabre. A story straight out of left field. I'm Keith Morrison and this is Something About Carrie, an all new podcast from dateline. Listen for free each week or unlock new episodes early and enjoy ad free listening by subscribing to DATELINE Premium on Apple Podcasts.
- [01:03]
Yasmin Bisugian
Hey, everybody. Welcome to here's the scoop of NBC News. I'm Yasmin Bisugian. Today on the show, an exclusive investigation into convictions connected to shaken baby syndrome. Does the science still hold up? Plus, the latest in the investigation over the mass shooting at Australia's Bondi beach, the gunman's ties to isis, and the president's chief of staff speaking out. What she said about Trump's quote, unquote, retribution. But first, we finally have the jobs report with data from October and November. It was held up by the government shutdown and it is not painting a very pretty picture. I want to bring in Christine Romans, NBC News senior business correspondent. Hi, Christine. The numbers that we've been looking at in October, the US losing 105,000 jobs in November, partly reversing those losses with 64,000 jobs added. But nonetheless, things are not looking good right now when it comes to unemployment rate and jobs. Walk us through some of these numbers.
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Christine Romans
So the unemployment rate at 4.6%, the highest in four years, you talk about that job loss in October, the government shut down, fog lifting. And we can see what's happening really. And you had huge job losses in federal government workers. That's on purpose. That is the administration putting those people out of work on purpose is the strategy of the White House. I look at this number, 271,000. That's how many federal government workers have been laid off since the beginning of the year that are showing up in these numbers. Some haven't shown up yet, but you're now starting to see they had taken a deferred buyout, so they hadn't been counted yet in job loss. More than a quarter of a million people. Every one of those fell federal government jobs is either a head of household or co head of a household. Right. So that is something significant to watch. And then in terms of the overall trend, the other big number that jumps out to me is 1.4 million. And our crack data team counted all these numbers, and yes, there are 1.4 million fewer jobs added this year than last year. 2025 is running 1.4 million jobs shy of 2024 levels. So something is happening.
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Yasmin Bisugian
So the question is, why? How did we get here? What would the White House be saying? What are they saying when it comes to these jobs numbers?
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Christine Romans
So we have to remember that the past few years have been gangbusters on job creation. I mean, every single year of the Biden administration was just gobs of jobs were created.
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Yasmin Bisugian
And could we say that was also a reflection of coming out of the pandemic? Right. Because there was a lot of job losses. There was a lot of folks staying at home. And so we were rebounding, rebounding.
- [03:49]
Christine Romans
There was also a huge bipartisan infrastructure bill that put tons of money into infrastructure projects, that put tons of money into transportation and warehousing and retail jobs, just exploding leisure and hospitality as people came out of the COVID bubble and were spending money and their personal budgets were flush, you know, their balance sheets. Companies have balance sheets. So do people. Yes, that people had money to spend. And then you have a new administration that comes in with an incredibly disruptive agenda of federal government cuts, federal government job cuts, tariffs, which have been incredibly disruptive to just about every single industry. And those tariffs keep changing. And you do have deregulation, which should be good for companies and good for job creation. And you also have big tax cuts that are coming next year for companies, which the hope is will spur some job creation as well. So we're just in a huge first year of a new administration, administration transition. And it's a transition on purpose again to reorder the American economy.
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Yasmin Bisugian
When you have an unemployment rate at 4.6%, how bad or good is that?
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Christine Romans
Well, look, we're coming off a period of what has been considered basically full employment where there were more job openings than there were people to fill them. And so that's what we're coming off of the last four or five years. And that wasn't just in the Biden administration. That started happening in the end of the Trump administration, the prior Trump administration, too. So this is a cooling labor market, but it is still resilient and robust. And that's what the Fed chief told me last week, 4.6% is not a worrisome number on its own, but you watch how it's ticking up and you wonder what's happening under the hood. Again, we still don't have the full picture because we don't have all that government data.
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Yasmin Bisugian
I want to read for you how the Vice President is kind of touting these numbers right now in Pennsylvania, saying the private sector wage growth is at a rate of 4.2%. You know what that means? That means we're seeing the fastest private sector wage growth that we have seen in this country in many, many years. What do you make of that?
- [05:59]
Christine Romans
So they don't like to talk about the government jobs because it's their intention to get rid of many, many of those government jobs. And they have more than a quarter of a million of them. Private sector wage growth that's looking at just private companies and what they're paying people. 4.2% is good. That is better than the inflation rate, which means that you have more money in your pocket at the end of the month. And that has been the talking point from the White House for some time now, telling people you feel better than you think you do because you are seeing wage gains. And we might be in a situation, honestly. Yes. Where there are numbers that tell one story and there are sentiment that tells another story. And those two things can be true at the same time.
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Yasmin Bisugian
And you and I have talked about that numerous times at this point when it comes to the economy. So last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, they decreased the interest rates by a quarter of a point. Right. And they said, but listen, we don't have the full picture. We're gonna have to keep looking at this thing, essentially. And obviously I'm paraphrasing here. So when you're looking at these numbers today and we still don't have this full picture and you're at the Federal Reserve, what are you thinking?
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Christine Romans
I think what I heard from the Fed chief in that room last week was those policymakers knew that there was some weakness brewing in the American labor market and that's why they cut interest rates last week. They were trying to support exactly what we're see in these tables. And the Fed chief said, we are well positioned. The Fed chief also said he thinks these numbers have been overstating job creation and we really are having negative job creation. He said that a couple of times in that press conference. My read is he wanted people to know the job market might be a little bit weaker than the numbers are showing us.
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Yasmin Bisugian
So out of the numbers, Christine, that have been coming out over the last couple of days, what I thought was most interesting was how people are feeling about the holidays in general, but how they're buying less presence now, now than they were in the last couple of years in part because of the anxiety they're feeling around the economy.
- [07:53]
Christine Romans
Look, the National Retail Federation is expecting a record breaking holiday season. They're expecting, I think the first trillion dollar holiday season. And then we don't know if that's going to happen. One of the reasons why people are spending more money on paper is because things cost more.
- [08:06]
Yasmin Bisugian
Right.
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Christine Romans
So you might be spending the same amount as last year, but you're going to buy fewer things.
- [08:10]
Yasmin Bisugian
Buy fewer things. Yeah.
- [08:11]
Christine Romans
That's one way to look at it. We had NBC News polling where we asked a bunch of these kind of questions that just came out Sunday that I've been fascinated by. When you look at by income group, people who make $100,000 or less are more dramatically pulling back on things like groceries, changing their grocery brands, changing their grocery stores, deciding to eat out less, less entertainment, all of those things are happening. But if you look at people who make $100,000 or more, you're not seeing that.
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Yasmin Bisugian
So what is the takeaway for folks that are feeling the squeeze right now?
- [08:47]
Christine Romans
The takeaway from these numbers is this is the softest patch we've seen in job creation in five or six years. Really, I would say post Covid because we've gotten out of the COVID bubble and blur. That Covid actually broke the economic charts. You know, I mean, you had a million jobs lost and a million jobs gained. It was little nuts. Now we're settling into here this period where this is what the.
- [09:15]
Yasmin Bisugian
First year.
- [09:16]
Christine Romans
Of the second Trump administration looks like as they embark on really a remaking of the American economy. And they have, they warned us there would be transition. This is what transition looks like.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Christine Romans, thank you. All right. We are going to take a very quick break. And when we are back, an exclusive NBC News investigation. Could new science overturn decades old convictions in cases of shaken baby syndrome? That is next. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now you probably need more on. Up first from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the upverse podcast from npr.
- [10:08]
Podcast Advertiser
This week on Meet the Press as.
- [10:10]
Dan Slepien
The Nation looks to 2026, how will concerns over the economy, health care and immigration shape the midterms? Kristen Welker sits down with Senators Raphael Warnock and Rand Paul. Plus, Steve Kornacki breaks down a new poll this week on Meet THE Press.
- [10:24]
Podcast Advertiser
Listen to the full episode now.
- [10:26]
Dan Slepien
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- [10:42]
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- [10:44]
Dan Slepien
The powerful and the privileged seemingly getting away with murder. But I discovered a much darker, more shocking tale than I ever could have guessed.
- [10:53]
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They put a sign around my neck that said, hi, my name is Michael Skakel and I'm a murderer.
- [10:58]
Dan Slepien
He's been talked about a lot, but he's never spoken up until now.
- [11:03]
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- [11:15]
Yasmin Bisugian
And we are back with Here's a scoop from NBC News Today. We have an exclusive NBC investigation about whether some convictions connected to shaken baby syndrome still hold up to scientific scrutiny. You take the case of Russell Mays. In 2004, Mays was convicted of killing his five week old baby Alex, allegedly causing him injuries that resulted in his death. He was sentenced to life in prison. His wife Kay pled guilty to reckless aggravated assault, though she did so without accepting guilt and she received probation. But when Nashville's Conviction Review Unit reopened the case two decades later, they concluded that the parents were not guilty, saying Alex's death was more likely the result of a medical condition. But the same judge that sat for the original case refused to vacate the Mazes convictions. So I want to bring in senior investigative producer Dan Slepien who's been following this for us. Hi Dan.
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Dan Slepien
It is always a pleasure to be with you.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Yes, great to have you in studio. Walk us through the story what happened to baby Alex as well as the Mays, Russell and Kay.
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Dan Slepien
This starts in March of 1999 when Alex Mays was born about 16 weeks premature. He was born at 3lbs 12oz and he came out with problems. The umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck twice. He had. He was immediately put in pediatric intensive care with a heart monitor and he was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. His parents, Russell Mays and Kay Mays, took him home with a stethoscope, with CPR training and with a heart monitor around this tiny little baby's body. Alex's mom, Kay Mays, spoke to us in her first public interview and talked about how when she brought him home, she had that mommy sense.
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Yasmin Bisugian
He went to the doctor seven times.
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Dan Slepien
Seven times. You took him just in that first month?
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Yasmin Bisugian
Yeah. I knew something was wrong to the.
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Dan Slepien
Point where she was told by a pediatrician, you're being a little bit of a helicopter mom. He's okay. He's just a little baby and he's small. When she saw bruising on his body at the end of that month of April in 99, she thought, hmm, should I bring him to the doctor? But they say that I'm being too much. I'm bringing him too much. The following week, his fifth week of life, Kay runs out to buy some formula.
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Yasmin Bisugian
I was gone maybe 20, 30 minutes, and the ambulance was there. And I instantly knew it was Alex. Russell grabbed me and he was crying. I was crying.
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Dan Slepien
What had happened, according to Russell, her husband, is that he saw Alex. He was in the bassinet and he had gone limp. He was turning blue, and he called 911 and they were resuscitating him just as Kay came back home. And so the ambulance, they take them to the hospital, and when they get to the hospital, they make a mistake and they call him a full term baby without significant past medical history.
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Yasmin Bisugian
So in the documents in which you guys have now subsequently reviewed, you saw the diagnosis or the way in which they characterized Alex, they characterized him as a full term baby in those documents.
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Dan Slepien
Right. So, I mean, that was just the beginning of kind of a domino effect of how they saw this child as a healthy child. That came in with the bruising. When they did the CT scan, they saw that his brain was swollen, he had bleeding around his brain, and he had bleeding behind his eyes. Those three things, those three symptoms are known as the triad. It meant one thing and only one thing, and that was child abuse. Shaken baby syndrome, also known as abusive head trauma. So police were called, and I interviewed one of the detectives who was the first one to arrive at the hospital. And she says when she came into the hospital, she was immediately told this was an abuse case. There's nothing to investigate. It's not an if it's who, it's either mom or dad.
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Yasmin Bisugian
It was open and shut, done.
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Dan Slepien
So it was all based on a medical diagnosis. Now, those injuries are severe injuries. They present as if a child potentially fell out of a building or got into a car wreck. And it was once believed that had to have come through shaking a baby so violently that the Rotational forces of the brain inside their head caused this kind of damage.
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Yasmin Bisugian
And this was an often common diagnosis back in the late 90s, early 2000s, shaken baby syndrome, because of where the science was then. You've been looking into a lot of these cases.
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Dan Slepien
I have.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Not just this one.
- [15:45]
Dan Slepien
No. It burst onto the scene in 1997 in a case called the Nanny Trial, the British Nanny trial. And she was a British nanny, 18 years old, had come over to Massachusetts and was working for a family named the Eepen family. And she was watching little Matthew, and he collapsed and died. And she was charged with shaking him to death. Her lawyer at the time was Barry Scheck. He made the argument that this triad of injuries could also be caused by other things. And what happened in that case actually is that she was convicted, but the judge sentenced her to time served in jail. She didn't even go to prison. But that was when it burst onto the scene. But what happened is that as time evolved into the 2000s, even the pediatric neurosurgeon who created the term, coined the term shaken baby syndrome, came to recant his own analysis of the one and only diagnosis as abuse. Now, it's important to say nobody should ever shake a baby. You can cause catastrophic damage to a baby if you shake a baby. The point is, it's not when they get it right, it's when they get it wrong. So the question is, was Alex Mays the victim of abuse or not? And the train left the station the moment he got to the hospital, and Dr. Suzanne Starling, the child abuse pediatrician, said, this is abuse. The detective came in, and it was over.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Do you know how many people have been convicted for shaken baby syndrome?
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Dan Slepien
There's no federal group or even a state group that tracks shaken baby cases. But the best estimates suggest that there's more than a , less than 2,000 that have been convicted of shaken baby syndrome. Now, the issue of shaken baby. We all often talk about how this affects people in criminal.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Court.
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Dan Slepien
Sure. The big story here is really not criminal court. It's family court, where the burden is lower for CPS workers legally to take a child away than it would be to convict someone in court beyond a reasonable doubt. In family court, it's beyond a reasonable.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Suspicion. And both actually happened to the Mazes. Not only was Alex taken away, in fact, they were convicted. And the Nashville Conviction Review Unit actually reopened this case two decades later. And they say the Mazes, both Russell and Kay, are.
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Dan Slepien
Innocent. Now, this is one of the things that really drew me to this story. I remember hearing about this story last year. New York Times and ProPublica are the ones that broke it. Last year, the Nashville District Attorney's office, which was the office that prosecuted both of them, reinvestigated the case and came to the conclusion not only were they wrongfully convicted, they were actually.
- [18:31]
Yasmin Bisugian
Innocent. Innocent.
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Dan Slepien
Yeah. These are the people that put them.
- [18:33]
Yasmin Bisugian
Away. Yeah. Not the same prosecutor, but the same.
- [18:36]
Dan Slepien
Office. The same office. And the basis of that was science that evolved over the course of quarter of a century. And that science was that there's differential diagnosis, not just shaking a baby, that things like strokes, seizures, severe illnesses, suffocation, hypoxia can cause the brain to swell and bleed, that cranial pressure can cause bleeding behind the eyes. And those three symptoms are caused by natural causes, or they could be caused sometimes even by accidents. It just didn't necessarily mean shaking and shaking alone. Right. So what the conviction review unit did is they said, look, we're not going to go take this back to anybody that was involved with the original case. Not the original prosecutor, not the medical examiner. We want to take a fresh look at the case. They went to the Knox county medical examiner in Tennessee. She reviews not only paperwork, she reviews the original scans and tissue samples that were still in the medical examiner's office all these years later. And she says, this baby was not shaken. This was a natural death. So they go to the court, and by Tennessee law, they had to go before Judge Stephen Dozier, who was the judge who oversaw the original trial more than 20 years ago. The judge denied the prosecutor and Russell Mays and stayed in prison. And Kay Mays conviction.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Stands.
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Dan Slepien
Right. So what happened was, after the judge denied the convictions, the Knox medical examiner who had reviewed the case for the cruise calls Bruce Levy, the original medical examiner, who did the autopsy of Alex Mays and declared this a homicide based on shaken baby syndrome. And she sent him all of the files, and he came to the conclusion that he had made a.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Mistake.
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Dan Slepien
Wow. So he writes an affidavit about his findings. I was the original medical examiner. I said it was a homicide. I was wrong. I would not testify to that. I believe Alex Mays died of natural causes. So I went to find him, and I found him in Pennsylvania, and he sat down with me in his first public comments about this, and he was very moved. What are you feeling right.
- [20:46]
Yasmin Bisugian
Now? I don't even know what I'm feeling right.
- [20:51]
Dan Slepien
Now. Mostly just dismay that, you know.
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Podcast Advertiser
I could have played a role in.
- [21:01]
Yasmin Bisugian
This, you know, horrific mistake. What is Russell and Kay's path forward. Do they have one at this.
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Dan Slepien
Point? Just yesterday, Kay's attorney filed an appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which is the highest court in Tennessee. But that appeal is asking the court to let them appeal. So it's basically a motion to say if we appeal, will you read it? Russell Mays, my understanding is that his attorneys also are going to appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, but his legal window is way more narrow than hers is because the judge already said no. And the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed that ruling knowing about Dr. Levy's recantation. So because they know already, the Court of Criminal Appeals in their paperwork, in their denial of Russell Mays affirming the lower court's ruling, they write about the affidavit and they call it a witness recantation without new science. But no one ever talked to him. He never got on a stand and was questioned about why. Have you changed your mind? What did you see that you didn't see back then? And the fight now for Russell Mays is to get Dr. Levy on a witness stand somewhere in front of a judge so they can hear.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Him. Dan Slepien, thank.
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Dan Slepien
You. Thank.
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Yasmin Bisugian
You. By the way, you can catch Dan's piece on nbcnews.com, youTube and on Hallie Jackson now on NBC News. Now. All right. Let's get to some headlines as tributes continue to pour in for director Rob Reiner and producer photographer Michelle Singer Reiner. Their son, Nick Reiner, is being charged with their murder, LA County District Attorney Nathan.
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Podcast Advertiser
Hockman. These charges will be two counts of first degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders. He also faces a special allegation that he personally used a dangerous and deadly weapon, that being a knife. These charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility parole or the death.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Penalty. Nick Reiner is currently being held without bail. Officials in Australia say the gunman who killed more than two dozen people at a Hanukkah celebration may have had a connection to isis. Police say they found two homemade Islamic State flags in a younger suspect's car and that the father and son had recently traveled to the Philippines. The specifics of their travel is still under investigation. Jewish groups in Australia as well as here in the US Are ratcheting up security at public events in the wake of the mass shooting. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were back on Capitol Hill briefing Congress on the situation in Venezuela and the US Military strikes on alleged drug boats. Lawmakers have been calling for an unedited video from a September 2 so called double tap strike to be released publicly. But Hegsest says they will only be showing it to members of the House and Senate Armed Services.
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Podcast Advertiser
Committees. We're also going to Tomorrow allow the HASC and Saskatchewan to see the unedited video of September 2nd alongside with Admiral Bradley, who has done a fantastic job, has made all the right calls, and we're glad he'll be there to do it. But in keeping with long standing Department of War policy, Department of Defense policy, of course, we're not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Public. On Monday, defense officials announced strikes on three more suspected drug vessels in the eastern Pacific which killed eight people. President Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, claiming his January 6 speech was maliciously doctored in a documentary called A Second Chance. In this suit, Trump accuses the British broadcaster of omitting his calls for peaceful protest at the Capitol and splicing his speech in a, quote, brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the election's outcome. To President Trump's detriment. The president has already had a streak of legal wins against media companies Paramount and ABC, each paying him around 16 million DOL dollars in settlements this year. BBC has said it will defend itself against the civil suit, which could mean a fierce legal battle in the future. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is pushing back against a buzzy Vanity Fair profile that offered a rare, unguarded look into the mindset of one of the most powerful people in the White House. Based on a series of 11 wide ranging interviews over the course of a year, Wiles is quoted as saying that, quote, when there is an opportunity for President Trump to take retribution, quote, he will go for it. In a post on ax, Wiles has rebuked Van Nephair's reporting, calling it a, quote, disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff and cabinet in history. In a statement, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said, quote, president Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. And before we go, we'd like to raise a toast to Bruce and Becky Mayer, an Indiana couple who got married this spring to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Now, this wasn't just a vow renewal ceremony. It was the real deal. Apparently the pastor who wed Bruce and Becky back in 1975 never filed their marriage license. And like most people, they couldn't be bothered with the paperwork to make it official. Years passed, and then in April their kids decided it was time for mom and dad to lock it down. They threw them a full wedding. And Becky says this go round, it felt.
- [26:37]
Christine Romans
Real. It was just a really wonderful experience. And I was deeply touched. It was just one of the very best days of my.
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Yasmin Bisugian
Life. And that's gonna do it for us at here's the scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Bisugin. We'll be back tomorrow with whatever the day may bring. And if you like what you heard, then subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you.
- [26:59]
Podcast Advertiser
Tomorrow. Before the trophy and bragging rights are rightfully yours, before your sleeper turns in a season no one saw coming, before stats and projections turn into points on the board and your lineup falls perfectly into place, you flip the lid on a can of on nicotine pouches. And as you make your first pick, you know this is the season where fantasy is going to surpass reality. It's on. Products for tobacco consumers 21 years of age or older. Warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive.