PARENTAL GUIDANCE: The parents of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley were both sentenced to 10-15 years in prison in the first case in which parents were found guilty of manslaughter for failing to keep a gun away from their mentally disturbed son. This serves as a huge warning to people who have guns in the house.

  “Opportunity knocked over and over again, louder and louder, and was ignored,” Judge Cheryl Matthews said. “No one answered and these two people should have and sure didn’t.” The stiff sentences were delivered after wrenching impact statements from the families of four murdered teenagers.

  The Crumbley’s son, who was 15 at the time he killed four fellow high school students, is serving life in prison.

  In a statement to the court, James Crumbley said he was not aware that his son was planning the shooting and that, “My heart is really broken for everybody involved.”

  The Crumbleys had given their son a pistol just our days before the shooting. They did not take their son out of school that day after they were warned that their son was showing violent tendencies.

  Reversing a statement her trial testimony that she would not have done anything differently, Jennifer Crumbley said, “With the benefit of hindsight and information I have now, my answer would be drastically different.” And she said, “I will be in my own internal prison for the rest of my life.”

THE COURT CHOOSES: Arizona’s supreme court yesterday upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, heightening a fight that is likely to dominate the fall presidential election and the vote for a pivotal Senate race in the battleground state.

  Immediately after the decision was announced President Biden issued a statement saying, “This ruling is a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.”

  The court put its ruling on hold, pending further lower court arguments about the old law’s constitutionality.

  The 1864 law would replace the state’s current 15 week abortion limit with a total ban except when necessary to save the life of the mother. The 1864 law provides no exceptions for rape or incest.

ORANGE ALERT: With the opening of his New York criminal trial less than a week away, Donald Trump is still trying to delay by challenging the gag order placed on him by judge Juan Merchan. 

  An appeals court judge immediately turned down a motion for delay yesterday but Trump can still appeal to a larger panel on Monday, the day jury selection is set to begin. Theoretically the trial could be paused after it starts.

  Trump is accused of falsifying business records hiding a payoff to porn actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election to stay mum about their affair. Judge Merchan ordered Trump to stop publicly attacking witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and relatives, including the judge’s own daughter.

DEAR DIARY: A federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Florida resident Aimee Harris to one month in prison for her involvement in a scheme to steal and sell the diary belonging to President Biden’s daughter Ashley in hopes of swaying the 2020 election. 

   Judge Laura Taylor Swain described the conduct of the 41-year-old Harris as “despicable and consequently very serious.”  Harris annoyed prosecutors and the judge in the case by missing a dozen sentencing dates with various excuses, including childcare. Prosecutors at one point asked for her to be sent away for 10 months. 

  In August 2022, Harris pleaded guilty to conspiring to transport the stolen Ashley Biden diary to New York, where she sold it to the right wing group Project Veritas for $40,000 just weeks before the election. The contents were never published.

DIVERSITY OF OPINION: A senior business editor at National Public Radio wrote a scathing inside view of what he describes as a liberal “diversity” monoculture in the news organization that is narrowing its band of listeners. 

  Uri Berliner, a 25-year employee, says in the article in the online publication The Free Press that, “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.” 

  Berliner writes about how race, gender, and sexual identity are dominating NPR’s coverage and its own newsroom culture. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system,” he writes.

  He tells how employees have divided themselves into every description of identification groups; Black, Latin, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender, just to name a few.

  He describes news production as “one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

  With a little research, he found that the newsroom didn’t have a single registered Republican on staff. In NPR’s quest for “diversity,” Berliner says, “And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Richard Leibner, the power agent for the stars of television news, many at CBS, has died at age 85. In his time the boisterous Leibner represented the likes of Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Bill Whitaker, Diane Sawyer … and Andy Rooney.

  Leibner succeeded in getting television news stars paid like movie stars. He ran the agency with his wife, Carole Cooper, who represented the editor of The Rooney Report.

THE SPIN RACK: The Norfolk Southern railroad has agreed to pay $600 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for the fiery and chemically polluting February 2023 train derailment in Ohio. Residents worry the money may not be enough to cover future health troubles its once divvied up.  

BELOW THE FOLD: Speaking of Trump’s upcoming trial, comedian Seth Meyers said last night that, “The only way you’re getting a juror who doesn’t know you is if it’s randomly Tiffany.”

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