What happened
Paramount yesterday officially completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a new Hollywood giant, Skydance, under the control of David Ellison. The $110 billion merger follows a “tumultuous, roughly yearlong fight,” The Associated Press said, and “further concentrates power” in an industry “already run by just a handful of major players.”

Who said what
“Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry,” Ellison said in a statement. The mega-merger “immediately catapults” the new company to the “front rank of competitors alongside streaming titans like Netflix and YouTube, just behind giants like Disney and Amazon,” The New York Times said. Industry insiders said the sharp consolidation of corporate power would lead to “job losses and further stagnation in Hollywood.” 

Mergers “don’t typically enter the zeitgeist for everyday Americans,” Axios said. But Ellison’s agglomeration of three major movie studios, streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+, news networks CNN and CBS News and multiple cable channels plays into the “broader societal debate” about media concentration.

What next?
Ellison, 43, must now “convince Wall Street” that Skydance can navigate “profound” changes in the news and entertainment industries while it pays down a “staggering” $82 billion in debt, the Times said. In a sign of “early turbulence,” ratings agency Fitch yesterday downgraded the new company’s bonds. 

What happened
A federal judge in New York reprimanded ICE and accused its officers of lying in court and falsifying records to cover up illegal arrests, including of a U.S. citizen, The New York Times reported yesterday. U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said in Monday’s ruling that ICE’s claims about misidentifying two Latino men arrested in May were “baseless” and part of the agency’s “troubling” pattern of justifying its erroneous arrests. The agents’ “illegal actions,, he said, “included significant injury to a U.S. citizen” during an “extremely violent” arrest. 

Who said what
Brown’s ruling “joins a growing wave of decisions by federal judges — including those appointed by Republicans — who have sharply rebuked ICE” for having “conducted warrantless arrests and trampled due process rights” during Trump’s mass deportation push, the Times said. Immigration agents have detained at least 506 U.S. citizens so far in Trump’s second term, ProPublica reported yesterday. That includes more than 100 Americans “held after agents questioned their citizenship,” at least 70 children and teens detained and 36 U.S. citizens “held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.” About a dozen citizens were deported.

What next?
Brown ordered ICE to “explain within three weeks” what it would do to “ensure future enforcement actions are conducted lawfully, and to address illegal arrests and falsified records and testimony,” the Times said. He didn’t rule out penalties or contempt charges.

Online sports betting is “associated with a doubling of the rates of severe cases of gambling disorders, with increases occurring only in young men,” said a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. More young men are showing up at emergency rooms with “major depression and suicidality,” as well as “other mental health or substance abuse diagnoses” exacerbated by gambling, said Time.

The uptick in these health issues is “particularly concerning given the rapid growth and promotion of online sports betting, which targets this demographic,” said study author Ryan Forrest, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, in a news release. The “consequences of rising gambling involve not just harm to people who are gambling but wider effects on families and communities.”

The study centered on Ontario, Canada, but the U.S. has a similar spike in gambling. Since 2018, several states have legalized online sports betting. 

“It’s just not a regulated environment out there,” said Cynthia Grant, the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, the largest U.S. provider specializing in treating gambling disorders, to Time. “People’s lives are being ruined, their relationships are being destroyed,” and “their retirement accounts are gone.”

This data “likely represents only a small fraction of the overall harms associated with gambling in the population,” said the study. Unfortunately, “most people experiencing gambling problems will never seek care,” said senior study author Daniel Myran. But the uptick in emergency room visits may be “revealing much larger increases in gambling-related harm.”