POLITICAL CHILL: Donald Trump spent the first morning of his New Hampshire primary campaign in a New York courtroom for the opening of the second defamation suit brought against him by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

  A nine member jury was selected to hear the case. Two prospective jurors who said they believe the 2020 election was stolen were passed over. Trump left for New Hampshire minutes before the jury returned from lunch and opening arguments were to begin.

  Trump is the #1 Republican candidate without ever exposing himself to the ravages of a debate. Candidate Nikki Haley said Monday night that she will not take part in any future debates unless Trump or President Biden are on the stage with her. Neither one took up the challenge and ABC News cancelled the Republican debate it had planned to host Thursday night. Ron DeSantis was the only candidate who offered to show.

  The candidates face a different mix of voters in New Hampshire with more independents and undecideds. Despite finishing third in Iowa, Haley insists she’s the only one who ultimately can beat Donald Trump.

WORLD AT WAR: The US took out four Houthi anti-ship missiles in Yemen yesterday in the third attack against the Iran-backed rebel group in the past week. The Defense Department said the target was missiles that were being prepared for firing at merchant and naval ships in the Red Sea.

  Earlier in the day a Houthi missile had damaged a Greek ship.

  Two navy SEALS are missing a sea in the seizure of a dhow carrying Iranian-made missile parts and munitions to the Houthi in Yemen. One SEAL fell into the water during the night operation and a second, following protocol, went in after him.

  In Gaza, the Israeli military says the Hamas tunnel network is even more extensive than they had originally known, consisting of as many as 450 miles of tunnels, some of them six or seven stories beneath the ground. The military says one tunnel is wide enough to drive a car through it and another beneath the house of a senior Hamas commander could be reached by a seven-story spiral staircase.

   The tunnel network was originally estimated to be 250 miles and the Israelis say there is more to be discovered. By one assessment, there are 5,700 access shafts to the tunnels.

  Knowing the tunnels are there and routing out Hamas fighters and leaders are two different things. As the Americans learned in Vietnam, tunnel warfare is vicious and dangerous.

BAD NEWS IN BALTIMORE: The staff at the storied Baltimore Sun are reported to be in despair after the paper was bought for as much as $100 million by David Smith, the chairman of Sinclair broadcasting, which owns 200 television stations across the country.

  The independent Baltimore Banner reports that in a three-hour meeting with the Sun’s staff Smith said he had not read newspapers for decades and stood by a 2018 statement to New York Magazine that he considered print media to be “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.”  And despite saying he had read the Sun only four times in recent months, he said he felt the same way about the Sun, “in many ways, yes.”

  Smith told the newspaper staff he has “no idea what you do” and that everyone still has a job, “today.”

THE SHOOTNG GALLERY: The killer in the 2022 Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges including hate crimes and to spend concurrent life sentences in prison rather than face the death penalty. 

  Anderson Aldrich, now 23, is already serving life on state charges for killing five people and wounding 19 at the LGBTQ bar. Federal prosecutors said in a court filing, “The parties have agreed that multiple concurrent life sentences plus a consecutive sentence of 190 years imprisonment is sufficient but not greater than necessary to achieve the goals of criminal justice.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: Tom Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post, whose sharp wit and incisive criticism could make or break a new television show, has died of the effects of Covid at age 79.  

  His cutting criticism earned him the nicknames Tom Terrible and Terror of the Tube. In a 1987 review of “The Morning Program,” CBS’s then latest reincarnation of morning news, he said that “some TV shows seem to call less for a review than an exorcism.”

  He panned the long-term hit “Grey’s Anatomy” saying it was a rehash of old medical show plots and that it was “a ‘new’ show only in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a new man.”

  He raved about “Twin Peaks” and “The Wire.” Shales loved television and loathed those he thought abused the medium. He told Time Magazine, “People who respect TV are the ones I respect. It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”

THE SPIN RACK: It’s so cold in the Midwest that electric cars are having trouble juicing up and keeping a charge in the batteries. — The man charged with three of the so-called Gilgo Beach murders on Long Island has been charged with murder in connection with the fourth body of a woman found at the beach. Prosecutors say they have DNA evidence connecting Rex Heuermann to that fourth woman. — Following a disappointing wild card loss to Tampa Bay Monday night, Philadelphia eagles center Jason Kelce announced his retirement after 13 years of professional football at age 36. He’s the brother of Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, who’s been dating a famous pop star.

BELOW THE FOLD: Donald Trump attacked his opponent Nikki Haley on social media yesterday, using her legal first name “Nimarata,” although he misspelled it as “Nimrada.” Haley’s legal middle name on her birth certificate is “Nikki” and Trump seems capable of spelling that.

-30-