TAKEN: The FBI says it recovered DNA in a glove found in the desert that appears similar to the gloves worn by the kidnapper in security video captured at the front door of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie outside Tucson. The hunt for the mother of “Today Show” anchor Savannah Guthrie is now in its third week.

  The FBI also says it has found DNA at the Guthrie home that does not match the DNA of anyone who should have been in the house.

  Investigators also say the kidnapper’s ski mask and backpack were bought from a Walmart store, possibly the same store. Walmart is cooperating in finding the customer.

  “Maybe it’s an hour from now,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the New York Times. “Maybe it’s weeks or months or years from now. But we won’t quit. We’re going to find Nancy. We’re going to find this guy.”

  Savannah Guthrie issue another video to the kidnapper last night saying, “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

THRILL OF VICTORY:  The Olympics are never a sure thing, even for the greatest in a sport. American Mikaela Shiffin, the winningest skier of all time, finished 11^th, far out of the podium ranks in the women’s Super-G.

  But on Saturday, US speed skater Jordan Stolz won his second gold medal in the 500 meter event. Stolz and the second and third place finishers all broke the previous Olympic record in the event. Can you imagine breaking a record and not winning gold?

  And yesterday, the American men’s hockey team crushed Germany 5-1 to win a bye into the quarterfinal round.

THE REGIME:

— NY Times writer Peter Baker wrote a blistering analysis of President Trump’s inexhaustible self-promotion and personal branding of everything he touches.

  Baker writes: “His picture has been splashed all over the White House, on multistory banners on the side of federal buildings, on annual passes to national parks and maybe even soon on a one-dollar coin. His name has been etched on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the U.S. Institute of Peace, on federal investment accounts, special visas and a discount drug program and, if he has his way, on Washington Dulles International Airport and Penn Station in New York.”

  Trump is not waiting until after his death to be honored and remembered. He’s doing it himself and building a cult of personality in the mode of Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao.

  “Presidents don’t name things after themselves, people name things after presidents,” Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University, told Baker “One is an expression of power and a demand for respect and status,” she said. “The other is an acknowledgment by the public of a job well done, a grateful public giving a president respect and status.”

  Baker notes that during a visit to Mt. Vernon during his first term that Trump was surprised that Thomas Jefferson did not name the estate after himself. Trump said, “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

— Answering a podcaster’s question about “decorum” in public discourse, former President Barack Obama took a swipe at Donald Trump, who posted a racist video of the former president and his wife portraying them as apes.  “There’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television, and what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office. That’s been lost.”

— Charges against two Venezuelan men, one of whom was shot by immigration agents, were dropped after a judge determined that federal agents made “false statements” under oath. In law enforcement, that’s known as “testilying.”

  Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a  DoorDash driver in Minneapolis who ran away from an agent who tried to tackle him, was shot in the leg when he went in the front door of a house and tried to close the door. DHS claimed … falsely … that Aljorna and another man assaulted the ICE agent before the agent fired his weapon.

THE WAR ROOM: More than 6,000 people were killed in just three days when a Sudanese paramilitary group unleashed “a wave of intense violence … shocking in its scale and brutality” in Sudan’s Darfur region in late October, according to the United Nations.

  The Rapid Support Forces committed widespread atrocities in their assault on the city of el-Fasher the UN Human Rights Office said in a report. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “The wanton violations that were perpetrated by the RSF and allied Arab militia in the final offensive on el-Fasher underscore that persistent impunity fuels continued cycles of violence.” 

THE SPIN RACK: NPR host David Greene is suing Google, accusing the company of using his voice as the model for the male voice on NotebookLM, the company’s artificial intelligence tool that creates podcasts on demand. Listening to them, you wouldn’t know the bot voice was not Greene’s but Google denies it. They’ll hear Greene’s voice in court … both versions.  

BELOW THE FOLD: The Olympics every four years expose us to sports and terminology we never see or hear otherwise. Curling, for instance, the art of sliding rocks on ice and sweeping to direct their path.

  Then there’s “Big Air” ski jumping, rocketing down a ramp, hitting the upward curved jump known as “the kicker,” then twisting and turning in the air. Here’s a brief collection of the names of moves in Big Air: The Triple Cork, Switch 1980, Butter, The Shifty, Rodeo Flip, Lincoln Loop, Japan Grab, and the holy grail of flying and spinning skiers, The 2160. We have no idea what that is.

BELOW, BELOW THE FOLD: The entire editorial staff of The Rooney Report is going skiing. We’ll be back in your mailbox Friday, February 27.

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