The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is planning to temporarily ban products containing certain synthetic versions of kratom, placing them in the same category as heroin and LSD.  The agency on Wednesday said it plans to classify a psychoactive compound called 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) and three related substances as Schedule I, meaning they have no accepted medical…

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President Donald Trump’s diatribes against the news media and Big Tech are more than a major plank in his MAGA platform. They’ve also been highly lucrative. 

A 2025 financial disclosure filing released Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics revealed that Trump earned $86.5 million from legal settlements with media and tech companies he had sued. 

The scale of presidential income is unprecedented, as are the lawsuits that led to the settlements. Many presidents have criticized the news media over coverage they disliked, but until Trump, no sitting president had ever sued a media outlet for defamation — or collected millions of dollars to dismiss such a claim. 

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Trump has done so repeatedly. He has never won a defamation case in court, despite filing more than 30 such lawsuits against news organizations or journalists since the 1980s. To the contrary, Trump has lost many defamation cases, both as a plaintiff and a defendant. The most notable may be the 2023 finding — which the Supreme Court recently let stand — that he was liable for sexual assault and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, with a jury awarding her $5 million. Legal experts say that Trump faces nearly insurmountable odds to win a defamation case at trial. 

But once Trump won a second term, the implicit threat of presidential punishment loomed. Suddenly, Trump’s ability to extract large payments without going into court increased markedly.

The settlements — part of some $2 billion in presidential revenue, most of it from cryptocurrency earnings — stem from lawsuits Trump filed against media and tech companies between 2021 and 2024. All were resolved after Election Day 2024. 

Among them are settlements that attracted widespread attention, including a $15 million payment from ABC News’ parent company, Disney, to resolve Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos. There is also Paramount Global’s $16 million payment last year to settle Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against Paramount-owned CBS News and “60 Minutes.” Barely three weeks after the latter settlement, federal regulators approved Skydance Media’s buyout of Paramount.

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On the tech side, Trump received a collective $59 million from the parent companies of YouTube, Facebook and X last year to settle his objections to the suspension of his social media accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. The companies briefly removed him from their platforms, citing policies against inciting violence, but restored him long before agreeing to terms. 

The settlements went to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation Inc., the document said.

The key question about these payments to the Trumps (according to the disclosure, the first lady received $10.71 million from Amazon, which spent $75 million to acquire and market a documentary about her) is whether Trump has used the power of the presidency, or the threat of his power, to extract money from companies subject to his administration’s decisions. The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. When previously asked about allegations of corruption or conflicts of interest, spokespeople have said that “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

In the wake of Trump’s settlement with Paramount, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and fellow House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to close loopholes involving financial contributions to presidential library funds. The proposed Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act would delay fundraising for libraries until after a president leaves office, establish a cap on contributions and ban conversion of donations for personal use, among other provisions. Congress has yet to act on it.

“The story here isn’t the amount [of the settlements]. It’s that this guy can’t win a case in court on the merits,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that defends First Amendment rights. “He has to use the regulatory agencies to put pressure on companies to settle.”

Corn-Revere and FIRE represent former Des Moines Register pollster J. Ann Selzer, whom Trump sued in late 2024 over a pre-election poll indicating Trump would lose the state by a wide margin (he later won it). Selzer and the Register continue to contest the case, Corn-Revere said, because they believe they can win on the merits and because newspapers aren’t subject to the kind of regulatory leverage that other media companies face.

“Many of these settlements and payouts were made by corporate media owners more interested in doing deals under the Trump administration than they are in standing up for the First Amendment rights of their newsrooms,” said Tim Karr, a spokesman for Free Press, a media reform and press advocacy organization. 

“To them, payments for Trump’s presidential library — some would call them bribes — are necessary to grease the regulatory skids for future deal approval. They see payments as the cost of doing business under Trump 2.0. They are simply fulfilling their fiduciary obligation to shareholders; their moral obligation to defend free-speech rights isn’t a part of the calculus.” 

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Trump has several defamation lawsuits pending against news organizations and reporters, with damage demands running into the tens of billions. Targets include The New York Times (over articles about his tax returns); The Wall Street Journal (over an article about a birthday card he allegedly sent to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein); and the BBC (over a 2024 documentary about the Capitol riot that allegedly used deceptive editing). 

Press experts and free-speech advocates have viewed Trump’s broadsides against the news media with alarm, citing his lawsuits as part of a larger array of administration threats and actions to limit or punish reporters, such as defunding public broadcasting, dismantling the federally funded Voice of America news agency and restricting reporters’ access to the Pentagon. Trump’s appointee at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has been a key ally and has threatened late-night TV hosts critical of Trump while launching investigations into the president’s perceived media adversaries.

Trump’s chances of prevailing in court remain low. A judge initially dismissed Trump’s suit against The Wall Street Journal, for instance, saying he had not shown the paper had published with “actual malice,” though Trump’s legal team has refiled. U.S. law requires plaintiffs to prove not just that a publication reported inaccurately but that it knew its reporting was false before publication. But while Trump has never been able to meet that standard in court, his financial disclosure suggests he doesn’t have to. As president, he has other ways to make media pay.

The post The $86 million takeaway from Trump’s media and tech settlements appeared first on MS NOW.

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The World Cup is in full swing, and the vibes are mostly positive! Scottish tourists drank Boston dry, Mexico lifted a 40-year curse, and African teams have had a historic showing. 

But there is one pesky little thing that fans REALLY don’t like: hydration breaks, which are a new addition to the tournament this year. Players have complained that they break up the rhythm of the game, and fans believe they are nothing but a cash grab, offering broadcasters more time for commercials. 

Roger Bennett, founder of the soccer podcast and media network Men in Blazers, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that the hydration-break rule has “done something that I thought was almost impossible in the football world, which is to unite the entire planet in anger against its very existence.”

Bennett spoke with Sean about where the hydration breaks came from, why everyone hates them so much, and what makes the World Cup such a special event anyway.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How did hydration breaks do the almost impossible?

Football is, at its heart, a very simple game. It is two halves of 45 minutes. That is the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. Crucially, it’s the way it is at the elite professional level, and it is the way it is at an under-seven game in Alaska.

It’s pretty critical to football that the game at all levels is exactly the same. That is, until the World Cup came to North America this summer. This is one of the hottest in global football history. And so Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, just imposed a new rule where they would have hydration breaks, which he said was part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible condition for players. He said they’re purely a sporting matter. 

Every half, it breaks in the middle now for an extended period, four minutes and 20 seconds per game. And what it does on Fox in America, as the players amble to the side, they now just talk about it as if it’s a routine part of the game. They say, ‘Oh, we’ve hit the water break! And then boom! We’re in commercials.’

The American football fans might be saying, what’s the big deal? There are constant commercials when I’m watching a game. But this has really triggered the football purists out there.

Football is a working-class game. Football is a game of fan devotion, connection. Football is deeply historic and there’s an authenticity to it. The heat is terrible in the United States, but many of these stadia are indoors, are air conditioned. 

You have this kind of ridiculous, surreal situation where footballers are taking a break in an air-conditioned stadium, ambling over to the side, and what it’s done is give coaches essentially a timeout in the middle of the game. You have players having a break. Exhausted players who are being run down by a superior opponent have a chance to catch their breath. We’ve seen game after game be utterly transformed by the momentum shift. 

When you see the figures that the broadcasters are making — said to be $250 million in terms of the commercials that they’re running in those slots — it’s a very odd moment in time where people are wondering: What is this? Why is this? And is this just for this World Cup or in dismal England in rainy November, will the Premier League start to take water breaks and we’ll cut to Coca-Cola commercials?

Does that mean that coaches and players like them, or are they complaining too?

Almost everybody hates them. A lot of the players talk about how hard it is to find a rhythm in a game, and then you’re stopping and going over to the sideline. 

By the way, at the beginning, the water break was just a water break and they would come back and often Fox at the beginning was caught in commercial and they’d come back to the game and it would be on, and people would lose their minds. And so what they’ve done, they’ve made it even more American. It’s almost like a TV timeout in the NFL now where the official keeps the players on the sideline until they know the commercials are run and then they let them on. 

Anthony Robinson, the US player, said he wanted to walk back onto the field and get back into his position. And one of the officials was like, ‘No, sorry, the commercials are still playing. Stay where you are.’ 

A couple of the coaches have admitted that they won games because they were able to make complicated tactical changes and communicate. Germany were playing Curaçao, who just tied the game up — one of the most delirious moments of this World Cup. And the young German coach admitted afterwards that he was able to adjust to playing against the diamond midfield shape that he didn’t expect. And Germany ended up winning 7-1. If you watch the game it was like flicking over radio stations before the water break and after the water break.

Do you think they’ll keep them around?

This is the greatest fault line in football, Sean. I do not have prophetic powers, but ultimately the whole game of football is currently in a battle between its roots and the commercial imperative that comes from being as big as it is. 

The Super Bowl and American sports in general are brazenly commercial. But 5 billion people watched the World Cup. Two hundred million people watch the Super Bowl. It is the last megaphone which is faintly audible around the world. And when you have something that big, it becomes deeply desirous to make as much money as you can out of it. And that’s the tension.

So this is about capitalism and the American version contra, perhaps, the European version. 

This is a question about European vacation policies. And you sound like you may have been a European in a previous life. 

Born to be an American, Sean, so I don’t know if I can answer what you’re asking, but go on.

I’ve been noticing the Scottish fans, the Norwegian fans, the Dutch fans just traveling from city to city to city. And I’ve wondered, how much vacation do these people have?

We’ve always joked that part of the reason that football has taken off in this nation is because Americans love an excuse to daytime drink and cut work. GDP plummets seriously in Europe during the World Cup, at an enormous clip. These fans, many of them sell houses. They sell off everything. They save for this. Remember, the World Cup’s every four years. That’s why it’s such a powerful experience. 

It is the spine to my life. When I meet someone and they tell me they met me in 1997, my mind goes to the nearest World Cup, 1998, and I remember that so viscerally, and then I can locate myself in time and space and know exactly where I was. It’s the spine to millions of human beings’ lives. So it’s not a, ‘Should I go? Can I go?’ It really is a compulsion. 

I think it’s been the joy of this World Cup. When you look back in 40 years, any World Cup you can name people. “Oh, that’s the Pele World Cup!” “Oh, that was a Maradona!” This one will be remembered probably for Messi just defying Father Time. Please god, for the United States going deep. But it will be remembered for the Scottish fans… The joy, their wonder, the openness, the love that they brought to our nation. So thank God they take the time that they do. 

There is a funny story of a number of them, like being caught on camera at games and having their boss see them and being recalled to work. But I think the world is better for them cutting work, for the decrease in productivity, for the utter shamelessness in ditching their families, their occupational growth. And that’s the joy of the World Cup too, Sean.

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