What happened
Kenneth Iwamasa, actor Matthew Perry’s live-in assistant and the person who injected him with a fatal dose of ketamine in 2023, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison yesterday. Iwamasa (pictured above) was the last to be sentenced of five people who pleaded guilty in the case, “seemingly bringing a yearslong legal saga to a close,” The New York Times said. Only “Ketamine Queen” Jasveen Sangha drew a longer sentence, at 15 years. 

Who said what
Iwamasa was Perry’s “enabler, drug messenger and de facto doctor,” The Associated Press said. Yesterday’s hearing was “largely a debate” over the “level of responsibility that can be put on the employee of a powerful person when addiction is in the mix.” Iwamasa’s lawyers asked for six months, but the judge matched the recommendation from prosecutors, who said the assistant “violated his position of trust” but also became their most important informant. “Matthew trusted Kenny. We trusted Kenny,” Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, said in a letter to the court. “Kenny’s most important job — by far — was to be my son’s companion and guardian in his fight against addiction.”

What next?
Iwamasa was ordered to report to prison on July 17. His sentence also included two years of supervised release and a $10,000 fine. 

What happened
Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (pictured above left) said yesterday that CBS News had declined to renew her contract, six months after she clashed with newly installed network boss Bari Weiss over a segment on torture in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. According to Alfonsi, “her agent’s inquiries with CBS News over the past several weeks had been met with silence,” The New York Times said.

Who said what
After Weiss pulled the CECOT report, saying it needed an on-camera response from the Trump administration, Alfonsi said in a newsroom memo that the decision was “political” and Weiss was giving the government an editorial “kill switch.” The segment “eventually aired” with “minimal changes,” The Washington Post said, but the “newsroom firestorm” reverberated. In a statement yesterday, Alfonsi said letting her contract lapse after nearly 20 years “was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting.”

What next?
Alfonsi “remains an at-will employee” at CBS, The Wall Street Journal said. An expected “re-engineering at ‘60 Minutes’” would be “a major gamble” for Weiss, the Times said. “Her other signature initiative, the remaking of ‘CBS Evening News,’ has suffered from low viewership and some embarrassing errors.”

Colossal Biosciences has successfully hatched 26 chicks from artificial eggs. The biotech company, known for its de-extinction agenda and previous claims about genetically engineering dire wolves, hopes to use the technology to bring back extinct birds.

Eggs are a “self-contained engine of incubation, doing away with the need for a living womb to keep a growing organism safe,” said Time. Colossal Biosciences created 3D-printed artificial eggs with a “semi-permeable silicone-based membrane housed inside a rigid hexagonal support cup,” the company said. This membrane was “engineered to replicate the gas-exchange function of a natural eggshell — allowing oxygen to pass through while blocking contaminants.”

Researchers “took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing,” said MIT Technology Review. So “artificial egg” may be a misnomer. “You’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg,” Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, told CBS News. “It’s an artificial eggshell.” And “producing a chick from an artificial vessel is not necessarily new,” said Nicola Hemmings, who studies bird reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield. 

Colossal Biosciences’ ultimate goal is to bring back extinct birds like the giant moa or dodo. The artificial egg’s design is “variable in size” and “scalable from hummingbird-egg dimensions down to the soccer-ball-sized eggs of the South Island giant moa,” the company said. But before Colossal can resurrect defunct species, “scientists will need to genetically engineer bird DNA at a much earlier stage,” said National Geographic.