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Today's Brief: Cities, Studios, and Plague

The Homebrew · · Posted · Updated · AI-drafted daily brief, synthesized from Left, Center, and Right coverage. Facts may be inaccurate — verify with the cited sources below.

California leaders condemned President Trump after he appeared to suggest at a Monday night rally that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego. Paramount Skydance completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday. Russia said no plague had turned up so far among contacts of a Siberian lab worker who died last week, and Francis Halzen won the Nobel physics prize for detecting cosmic neutrinos. The Pentagon said Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan will face a firing squad, and televangelist Jim Bakker died at 86.

Trump’s Iran remark about Los Angeles and San Diego draws California backlash. Defending high gas prices during the war with Iran at a Monday night rally in Nebraska, President Trump said, “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,” the New York Post and CBS News reported. It was not immediately clear what he meant, CBS News said. Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X, “He is deranged and dangerous.” White House communications director Steven Cheung said Tuesday that Trump “was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn't been stopped,” the New York Post reported. The Guardian’s headline said Trump “calls for Iran to strike US cities”; the Post’s said he was “joking.”

Paramount completes its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed Tuesday, the New York Post reported; the BBC valued the deal at $110 billion, NPR at $111 billion, and the Post at $81 billion. The new company, to be called Skydance, brings together HBO, CBS, and DC Studios, the BBC said; the Post noted it also includes CNN. Under a settlement last month with about a dozen states led by California, Paramount must release at least 30 films a year or sell its 49% stake in Miramax, and it agreed to a “news editorial independence board” for CNN and CBS, the BBC reported. NPR noted concerns about CNN’s future “given that Ellison is an ally of Trump,” referring to chief executive David Ellison.

Russia reports no plague among contacts of a dead Siberian lab worker. Russian officials said Tuesday that plague had not been detected among close contacts of a worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East who died last week, with 60% tested so far; screening found two Covid-19 cases and two rhinovirus cases, NBC News reported. Russian authorities have not confirmed that plague was involved in her death, NBC News said. A World Health Organization spokesman put the risk at “very low for the WHO European region,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “I think it's incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” CBS News reported. Salon wrote that Russia “does not seem to be fully cooperating.”

Francis Halzen wins the Nobel physics prize for a South Pole neutrino hunt. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin,” its press release said. Halzen first proposed capturing neutrinos in South Pole ice in 1988; IceCube, a cubic kilometre of ice fitted with light sensors, was finished in 2011. Because neutrinos reach Earth without changing direction or losing energy, they carry information unavailable any other way, the academy said. Halzen, 82, told the committee, “It was a great surprise and I obviously didn't expect it,” NPR reported.

Pentagon says a firing squad will execute Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said late Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended, and President Trump approved, executing former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan by an Army firing squad, CBS News reported. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote. Hasan killed 13 unarmed soldiers and injured 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, the deadliest non-combat attack on a U.S. military base, the BBC reported; a 2013 court-martial sentenced him to death. CBS News said it could be the military’s first execution of a service member since 1961; the BBC said it would be the first military execution by firing squad since World War II.

Televangelist Jim Bakker, felled by the PTL scandal, dies at 86. Jim Bakker, who with his first wife, Tammy Faye, built an evangelical empire around “The PTL Club,” died Monday at 86, his second wife, Lori, said, CBS News and Fox News reported; the cause was not immediately clear. In 1987 Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church clerk Jessica Hahn and was forced to resign; he was later convicted after a fraud and conspiracy indictment and sentenced to 45 years, a term reduced to eight, CBS News reported. The Guardian said he spent four and a half years in prison and later became “a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.”

Cornell faculty move toward a no-confidence vote over an alleged assault. Cornell University faculty submitted a resolution Monday evening declaring no confidence in the administration’s handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity house, NBC News reported. It says the Faculty Senate “has no confidence in the ability of the central administration to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault at Cornell University”; the Senate meets Oct. 14. Faculty Senator Paul Ortiz told CNN that around 40 of roughly 75 voting senators have expressed support, and President Michael Kotlikoff has said he supports an outside review, the Washington Examiner reported. Last month a former student identified as Jane Doe sued Cornell and seven current and former students, NBC News said. The Examiner devoted much of its report to differences between Doe’s initial police interview and her lawsuit.

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