Hello and welcome to Background Briefing available 24-7 at background briefing. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with a hostile takeover attempt by the country's second richest billionaire,

apparently in cahoots with his buddy President Trump,

aimed at undoing the recent deal signed between Netflix and Warner Brothers,

which would make the Ellison's powerful owners of a Trump-friendly

media giant that already owned CBS and would soon own Warner Brothers and more importantly, CNN.

Joining us is William Cohan, a former senior Wall Street investment banker for 17 years

at Lazard Frere and Company, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan Chase, as well as a New York

Times bestselling author whose books include Money and Power, How Goldman Sachs came to Rule the

World, House of Cards, a tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street, and most recently

power failure, the rise and fall of an American icon. He is a founding partner at Puck News,

where his latest article we will discuss is Netflix's 83 billion math and the Ellison

hostile meter. Then with Zelensky meeting today with the leaders of the UK, France, and

Germany, who are alarmed by the Trump administration's new national security

strategy that is friendly to the murderous Putin while hostile to what they call the European elite

because they won't let far-right parties into governing coalitions.

We will assess why Trump and MAGA Republicans favor strategic stability with Russia over security for NATO.

Joining us is Aram Shabhanian, a national investigative reporter and a former open source information gathering manager at New Lines Institute.

He recently taught in non-proliferation and terrorism studies at the

Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, where his research focused on the

Cold War and contemporary histories of Eastern European and the Middle East, and he has just

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