Good morning. 
The Dr. King Holiday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:51 PM, for 9h 30m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred thirty-second day and the seventy-third day.
On this day in 1977, Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ben Smith writes Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition:
On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)
Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.
But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.
Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?
Robyn Dixon reports Global pressure mounts for release of newly detained Russian opposition leader Navalny:
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Navalny, 44, said in a videoed comment in court, where pro-Kremlin media had been ushered in through a side entrance. “A few minutes ago I was taken from my cell to meet my lawyers and they brought me here to a session of the Khimki city court. There are unknown people in the room, unknown people recording video,” he said in the video released by his press secretary.
The hearing took place at the Khimki police department near Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Alexander S. Pushkin International Airport where he was arrested after flying home to Russia from Germany where he had been receiving medical treatment after from an August poison attack.
Victoria Bekiempis reports VOA journalists call on director to resign over ‘propaganda event’ for Pompeo:
[Reporter patsy] Widakuswara posted to Twitter a description of the questioning which allegedly led to her removal from her beat. On 11 January, she wrote, she asked Pompeo “What are you doing to repair [the] US reputation around the world?” and “Mr Secretary, do you regret saying there will be a second Trump administration?”
“The nation’s top diplomat [ignored] my questions,” she wrote.
According to the VOA journalists’ letter, Reilly shouted at Widakuswara: “‘You obviously don’t know how to behave. … You are out of order!’”
Several hours later, the letter said, [Deputy Director] Robbins removed Widakuswara from covering the White House.