Sunday, February 08, 2026 |
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Good morning, Welcome to MS NOW's Sunday Spotlight, where you can find a selection of the week's most interesting and important stories. The NFL knows exactly what it's doing with a halftime show that has upset the president. Meanwhile, a storied newspaper is being decimated, conspiracy theories are flourishing about a high-profile criminal trial, and President Donald Trump is trying to name an airport and a train station after himself. Plus, the 2-year-old girl who spent 27 hours in federal custody after an immigration raid. Don't forget to check out more top columns and videos from the week below. |
Good money: NFL owners may lean conservative, but they know that to make money they need to expand their reach, especially to Latinos in this country and regions such as Latin America. That's why the Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny is exactly who the NFL wants and needs for the Super Bowl halftime show, argues Julio Ricardo Varela, founder of The Latino Newsletter. That's put the game at odds with the president, who called Bad Bunny's pick "ridiculous" and claimed he and pregame act Green Day were just there to "sow hatred." Read more. |
Darkness rising: After billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, the newspaper changed its slogan to "Democracy Dies in Darkness." This week, the storied paper took a major hit out in the open, laying off one-third of its staff, eliminating the sports, books and audio departments and slashing the metro and foreign staffs, including at least one reporter in an active war zone. The changes show the paper's leadership have "no sense of strategy or journalistic purpose," argues former Post reporter Glenn Kessler. Read more. |
Kirk conspiracies: The capital murder trial against the man accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk is in its early stages, but it's already being shaped by conspiracy theories. Conspiracist influencers are sharing ham-fisted and unfounded theories, writes Brandy Zadrozny. Defense attorneys have invoked those theories in seeking to have prosecutors removed, while they've been used to argue for and against opening the hearings more to the public. Read more. |
Trumpmenistan: Trump and his allies have applied his name to the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, a new class of battleships and various government programs. Now he's holding an infrastructure project hostage unless Washington-Dulles International Airport and New York's Penn Station are renamed for him. This isn't just egotism, it's an authoritarian tactic that can be seen everywhere from Turkmenistan to North Korea, argues Zeeshan Aleem. In this case, at least, Trump is unlikely to get what he wants. Read more. |
Toddlers in custody: A recent independent analysis found that the number of children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has skyrocketed, from an average of 25 per day at the end of Joe Biden's term to about 170 per day in Trump's second term — and as many as 400 on some days, write Kay Guerrero and Jacob Soboroff. At the end of January, one of those children was 2-year-old Chloe Tipan Villacis, who was swept up during a raid in Minneapolis, spent 27 hours in federal custody and was flown to Texas with her father until ICE released her after a federal judge's order. Read more. |
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For most Americans, the 2020 election was over when the media declared Joe Biden the winner. But for Jacquelyn Lopez, a lawyer who worked on voter protection for the Biden campaign in 2020, her work was just beginning. Her legal team observed as each of Georgia's 159 counties counted ballots, certified the count and then counted them again by hand. The Trump campaign then demanded a statewide machine recount. "After three counts, the results remained unchanged," she writes. On Wednesday, Trump tried again, sending a phalanx of FBI agents to Fulton County's elections operations center to seize ballots and other documents. "Americans who believe in free and fair elections should be terrified," Lopez argues. Read the column here. — Ryan Teague Beckwith, newsletter editor |
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Tonight, following the release of more than three million additional documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle examine the biggest takeaways and discuss the lack of accountability in this case with a survivor of Epstein's crimes. Watch a special encore presentation of "Revealed: Inside The Epstein Files" tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern on MS NOW. |
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Symone Sanders Townsend and Eugene Daniels are analyzing how culture and politics collide in their new original podcast, "MS NOW Presents: Clock It." The Washington power-players will take on the latest political news, the catchiest cultural moments, and how the two converge. Listen to the trailer and follow now. The first episode drops next Thursday. Subscribe to MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts for ad-free listening and bonus content. |
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