Today's five.

The DOJ just waved through a $110 billion Hollywood merger after reviewing two million documents, which is the regulatory equivalent of reading every email someone ever sent and shrugging. Paramount Skydance absorbs Warner Bros. Discovery — meaning CBS, HBO, CNN, and whatever's left of the theatrical movie business all end up under one roof. The DOJ's reasoning is notably modern: streaming expanded competition so much that two legacy studios combining isn't actually that scary anymore. CBS News reported the story while also being owned by one of the companies involved, which is the kind of sentence that writes itself.

A crowd showed up to the Kennedy Center with scaffolding and chants of "Take it down," which is not a sentence you expected to type in 2026. A federal judge ruled that only Congress — not the Board of Trustees — has authority to rename the building, then denied a stay. The Trump administration filed for an emergency stay. That was denied too. The Atlantic covered the crowd energy; NPR counted the legal denials. As of Friday, the 18-letter addition to the marble facade was still up, but running out of friends in court.

Containing a scandal about Jeffrey Epstein turns out to be harder than the White House expected, which surprises approximately no one who has followed this story for the last five years. A report dropped describing the administration's internal efforts to manage the fallout — and now a House Democrat is pressing the Oversight Committee to put Trump officials under oath about it. The Dispatch framed it as a White House competence problem. The Hill framed it as an oversight accountability moment. Both are right, and neither framing makes the underlying situation look good for anyone involved. The Epstein files have now outlasted three separate attempts to make them go away.

That last part is doing a lot of work. The U.S. military killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores — "Niño Guerrero" — leader of Tren de Aragua, in what Trump called a "swift and lethal kinetic strike" announced on Truth Social at midnight. The strike was carried out by U.S. Southern Command with Venezuelan government cooperation, which is a notable sentence given where U.S.-Venezuela relations have been living for the past decade. Bloomberg went with the operational details. The Hill went with the military jargon. Nobody's asking the obvious follow-up question about what Venezuela got in return.

Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty to helping submit a fraudulent electoral slate in Georgia, and Florida's response was a strongly worded letter. The state Supreme Court declined to suspend his law license — opting for a reprimand instead — over the explicit objection of the one justice who dissented. A reprimand means he keeps practicing. The dissenting justice, Jorge Labarga, was the only member of the court who wanted something stronger. Bar discipline after election-related convictions is rare enough that there isn't really a precedent to point to. There is now.