NEW YEAR’S FIRE: About 40 people are believed to be dead and 115 injured after a rapidly spreading fire at a crowded bar in the popular Swiss ski resort town of Crans-Montana overnight on New Year’s Eve. Burn victims were flown all over Switzerland and to other countries for treatment.

  Witnesses said the fire started when a half-dozen revelers held up champaign bottles with sparklers in them, igniting the ceiling and setting a blaze that quickly spread over the heads of the crowd.  At least one picture shows a cluster of people with the champagne bottles that held sparklers and a brief video shows a man trying the slap down flames in the ceiling with a towel.

 Authorities described the fire as a “flashover” in which every combustible material in the room caught fire but they have not corroborated the cause as described by survivors.

  The bar was a magnet mostly for a younger crowd just over and under the age of 20. It was a place where you could get a hot chocolate or something stiffer. As the flames spread, patrons jammed up a narrow staircase and smashed windows to escape.

THE REGIME:

— President Trump said he will not deploy the National Guard in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon following the Supreme Court ruling that he could not deploy troops in the Chicago area over the objections of Illinois officials. “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — Only a question of time,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

— Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have provided money to finish a project that would bring water to southeastern Colorado, where his support runs deep. The President claims the project is way over budget and wasteful. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the nation,” he wrote.

  Trump may also have been acting in a punitive snit against Colorado for the imprisonment of his supporter Tina Peters, who was convicted of state crimes in attempting to overturn results of the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. He posted: “God Bless Tina Peters, who is now, for two years out of nine, sitting in a Colorado Maximum Security Prison, at the age of 73, and sick, for the “crime” of trying to stop the massive voter fraud that goes on in her State (where people are leaving in record numbers!).”

EYE ON NEWS: CBS News is promoting their new Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil with a video of him wandering Grand Central Station with his name on a card, asking passersby if they can pronounce it. Not only could they not pronounce it, he had to tell people who he is.

  When he goes on air Monday, Dokoupil will be the fourth person to sit at the Evening News desk in less than a year. He has been one of a trio of Morning News anchors since 2019. Viewers have never seen him covering a war, or even the White House.

  Dokoupil replaces Maurice Dubois and John Dickerson, who less than a year ago began hosting a re-engineered Evening News that failed to take off.

  In an attempt at news populism, Dokoupil says in another promotional video that: “On too many stories the press has missed the story, because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or, we put too much weight in the analysis of  academics or elites, and not enough on you.” 

  CBS under the direction of its new editorial chief Bari Weiss is trying to battle distrust of the news industry generated by Donald Trump, even though she does not attribute the problem to Trump and his accusations of “fake news.” Weiss has said CBS needs to “restore the integrity of the news,” as if the integrity has actually been lost. Dokoupil said in his video, “I have felt that what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn’t reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life.” We’ll see whether this new approach works, or becomes another ratings crater for the once-venerated Evening News. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Character actor Isiah Whitlock Jr., who had a long career and made himself a part of popular culture with a certain expression playing crooked Maryland State Senator Clay Davis on HBO’s “The Wire,” died this week after a short illness at age 71. That expression: “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit.”

THE SPIN RACK: New York’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was sworn in shortly after midnight yesterday on the steps of City Hall’s beautiful yet dormant subway station.  At a public ceremony in the afternoon the 34-year-old Democratic socialist delivered a speech of hope and promise saying; “A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent.” — The number of hospitalizations, emergency room, outpatient visits, and deaths associated with the flu have spiked, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Flu season hits its peak in February. — In a harbinger of what’s coming for the newspaper business, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, the newspaper started as The Atlanta Journal 157 years ago, published its last paper edition on Wednesday, going fully online. — Thieves last weekend drilled a hole through the wall of a bank in the German city of Gelsenkirchen, broke into more than 3,000 safety deposit boxes, and made off with $36 million in valuables. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Comedy writer Toby Morton, 54, who has worked on the animated sitcom “South Park,” predicted that Donald Trump would add his name to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and bought the domain “TrumpKennedyCenter.org.” Click on it and the front page tells you, “We exist to preserve what must endure, to honor what must not be questioned, and to gather those who understand that greatness is not chosen, it is recognized.”

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