THE LAUGHTER DIES: Thirty-two-year old Nick Reiner was booked yesterday for the murders of his parents, the beloved actor-director Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner, a producer. The couple was stabbed to death.

  Nick Reiner is being held in lieu of $4 million bail.

 Police focused immediately on the Reiner son who has a history of drug abuse and homelessness. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “Family friends told The Times that Rob and Nick got into an argument on Saturday evening at a party at Conan O’Brien’s home and that many people noticed Nick acting strangely at the party.”

  The Reiners were found dead in their home by their 28-year-old daughter, Romy.

  Nick Reiner had cooperated with his father on a 2015 movie called “Being Charlie” that was loosely based on his life struggling with addiction.. The movie opened with the following on screen: “For years, Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife struggled as their son Nick was addicted to hard drugs, rotating in and out of rehab facilities like they were shopping malls. The couple wondered if there was an end in sight, and whether it would be the tragic one that a voice in the back of their heads kept telling them was coming.”

DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: President Trump posted a note of vitriol following Reiner’s murder, calling him “a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star” claiming that Reiner “passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.” Trump said Reiner “was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.”

  Not satisfied to leave it at that, the President told reporters in the Oval Office that Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.” He said, “I thought he was very bad for our country.”

  Satirist Andy Borowitz said, “Trump makes the most ardent atheist want to believe in Hell.”

MURDER MOST FOUL: Brian Walshe, a Boston man of mysterious wealth with a taste for entertaining in high end restaurants, was found guilty yesterday of murdering and dismembering his 39-year-old wife, Ana, who was last seen having dinner with her husband on January 1^st, 2023.

  Investigators never found a body, but Walshe was given away by his searches on the internet:

      “How long before a body starts to smell? 

      “Hacksaw best tool to dismember.

      “Dismemberment and best ways to dispose of a body.” 

     “Can I use bleach to clean my wood floors from blood stains” 

     “Can you be charged with murder without a body.”

   You can, and you can be convicted. In November Walshe pleaded guilty to misleading a police investigation, and improper conveyance of a human body, but still claimed he didn’t murder his wife. The jury decided otherwise.

LAST CLASS: Investigators in Providence, Rhode Island released more surveillance video and a photograph of an unidentified man suspected to have been the shooter who killed two students in a Brown University classroom on Saturday.

  The man is wearing a knit cap, a mask, and a two-tone jacket that’s green at the bottom and black over the shoulders. He has a knock knee walk with a hint of a limp on the left side.

  The two students killed have been identified as Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama who spoke fluent French and played piano, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, a naturalized American from Uzbekistan who hoped to become a neurosurgeon.

THE REGIME:

— The Pentagon announced that it has blown up three more suspected drug boats, killing eight people and bringing the toll to 95. 

— Federal authorities say they’ve disrupted a New Year’s Eve plot to use explosives to attack several companies around the Los Angeles area. Four suspects were arrested. The Justice Department says they are members of a far-left anti-government group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front. 

—Lawyers for the Trump administration filed papers in federal court claiming that construction on President Trump’s 90,000 square foot ballroom must continue as a matter of national security. The filing did not explain the national security claims. The filing also says a preservationist organization suing to stop the project has no standing to sue.

— President Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion claiming he was defamed in a documentary edited to make it appear that he had called for violence in his January 6^th, 2021, speech before the Capitol insurrection. Trump claimed the documentary was an attempt to influence the 2024 election.

  The BBC has apologized for the edit and says it will fight the lawsuit. 

THE WAR ROOM: Ukraine says it has made its first strike with an underwater drone, seriously damaging a Russian Kilo-class submarine docked at a Black Sea port. The Kilo-class subs are not nuclear powered. They’ve been used to launch conventional missiles at Ukraine.

THE SPIN RACK: The two American soldiers killed in Syria on Saturday have been identified as sergeants serving with the Ohio National Guard. They were Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, originally from Marshalltown, Iowa northeast of des Moines, and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, 25, from Des Moines. — Australian authorities say the two Bondi beach gunmen who killed 15 people were motivated by Islamic State ideology. They had travelled to the southern Philippines where ISIS is active. — Donald Trump Jr. and Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson are engaged after a year of dating. He’s been engaged before.

BELOW THE FOLD: President yesterday signed an order instructing fentanyl to be designated as a “weapon of mass destruction.”

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