Random News: March 10, 2024

DISCLAIMER: Zak's Random News is very random and doesn't cover many things, and not everything may be accurate, because I'm just some guy. Go find a real news source.

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Good morning. It’s March 10, 2024, and it’s a Sunday. As I’d griped about yesterday, it’s also the first morning of Daylight Saving Time, but as usual, it being a Sunday, the real pisser will be tomorrow morning when my alarm goes off in pitch black darkness. We’ll save those complaints for later. For now, let’s do some news.

• I will make one mention of DST, since it affects a good number of us who do international business or have friends situated around the world, as I believe most of us do in 2024.
• The propensity for Americans to assume that everyone in the world does the same as they do is reflected on this topic. True, the bulk of the United States, most of Europe, and parts of Canada, Australia, Latin America, Brazil and the Caribbean continue to do Daylight Saving Time.
• Side note: not even the entire USA observes DST. Hawaii and Arizona skip it, as do American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• But plenty of other places around the world have opted out of it entirely. These include all of Asia, and most of Africa. Over the past ten years, Azerbaijan, Iran, Jordan, Namibia, Russia, Samoa, Syria, Turkey, Uruguay, and most of Mexico have all ended the practice.
• Perhaps someday we’ll join them and the world will be as one.
• Okay, news.
• If you want to hear a tangible sign that President Biden’s SOTU speech was effective, this is a good one: his re-election campaign brought in $10 million in the 24 hours following the address on Thursday.
• The sum is a record for Biden’s re-election effort. The money flowed in via approximately 116,000 donations from 113,000 contributors.
• Biden’s campaign had $56 million in the bank at the end of January, while the DNC had $24 million. Dumpy and the Republican National Committee, meanwhile, had $30 million and $9 million on hand, respectively.
• And now that the Republican National Committee is being run by Dump’s daughter-in-law Lara, whatever cash they have will be going to Dump’s personal legal troubles.
• They are so fucked.
• Speaking of which… 
• On Friday, Donnie Dump secured a $91,630,000 bond for the judgment in his defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. The previous day, the judge overseeing the case shot down Dump's request for a temporary delay of the penalties.
• Where did he get that cash? 
• Dumpy obtained an appeals bond from the Virginia-based Federal Insurance Company totaling $91,630,000 to cover the $83 million judgment in the case plus interest.
• Who is this “Federal Insurance Company”? It’s a subsidiary of Swiss-headquartered insurance company Chubb Group LLC. In 2018, Trump appointed Chubb’s CEO Evan Greenberg to a White House advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations.
• It is not clear from court records what collateral Trump presented to obtain the bond from Chubb.
• What is clear is that Dumpy has not yet learned his lesson. One day after posting that bond in excess of $91 million that allows him to appeal the defamation judgment he owes E. Jean Carroll, he went and defamed her again, opening himself up to a third lawsuit.
• Last night in Georgia, he said Carroll's story was "totally made up."
• ”$91 million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn't know ... She said things. And when I denied it — I said, 'It's so crazy. It's false' — I get sued for defamation."
• Keep it up, smelly fat man.
• Moving on…
• Many of us for the past nearly two years have been horrified by the attack on women’s reproductive rights via the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v Wade decision.
• President Biden has vowed to return these rights to American women. At the State of the Union on Thursday night, he said, “If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”
• But in reality, Roe was never enough to truly ensure reproductive autonomy in the first place. It came under attack almost immediately after being passed in 1973.
• Over the decades, elected officials and the courts took a hammer to Roe by passing and then blessing hundreds of restrictions, some targeting abortion facilities and doctors with excessive regulation, others erecting barriers between pregnant people and care, many of them based entirely on junk science.
• In the years before Roe fell, near-total bans on abortion had become commonplace, passing in a number of states under the notion that legal personhood should begin before the person exists.
• Whatever happens next to stop the government from controlling the sexuality and reproductive freedom of women, it has to go beyond the limited scope of Roe. We should be looking for more freedoms, not just scratching back the ones that have been stolen from us.
• Start by electing people who believe women can make their own choices without government interference.
• In other news, maybe today is a day to appreciate the remaining freedoms you have as an American not living under a dictatorship.
• A Moscow court has sentenced a Russian university student to 10 days in jail for naming his Wi-Fi router with a pro-Ukrainian slogan.
• Oleg Tarasov, a Moscow State University student, named his Wi-Fi network as “Slava Ukraine.” He was found guilty of propaganda on Thursday, and authorities confiscated his router.
• Don’t let the USA get that way by putting Dumpy back in control. Dump is an admirer of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, as you’re all aware. He’d love to put your college kids in jail for actions like this.
• It’s Sunday Gunday here at Zak’s Random News, where we look at just some of the incidents of gun violence in the USA over the past couple of days.
• Three people shot dead, five more injured in a shooting in Jonesboro, AR. Two dead and another seriously injured in a triple shooting in Mooresville, NC. A mother and her 11-year-old daughter shot dead in Worcester, MA. Two dead in a shooting at a store in Kansas City, MO. A man and a woman shot dead, another injured in separate shootings in St. Louis, MO. One dead and two injured in a shooting in Jersey City, NJ. One dead and two injured in a shooting in Baton Rouge, LA. One shot dead outside of a bowling alley in Cleveland, OH. A teenager shot dead in Bridgeport, CT. Another teenager shot dead in Lexington, KY. A man shot dead in Fort Collins, CO. A man shot dead in Coatesville, PA. A child shot in northeast Columbus, OH. One shot dead in southeast Albuquerque, NM. One shot dead in Fort Lauderdale, FL. One shot dead in DeLand, FL. One shot dead in Ferriday, LA. A 21-year-old woman shot dead in Petal, MS. A teen high school student shot dead in a drive-by north Harris County, TX. One shot dead in the Hermosa neighborhood in the Northwest Side of Chicago, IL. Two teenagers and a woman bystander shot in Downtown Atlanta, GA. Two shot in Westland, MI. Two shot in Sacramento County, CA. One woman shot on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, CA. Another woman shot in a domestic violence incident in northeast Fresno, CA. One man shot in the parking lot of a bowling alley in Kenner, LA. One shot in the Roselawn neighborhood of Cincinnati, OH. One shot in Orlando, FL. One shot in Apopka, FL. One shot in Toledo, OH. One shot in Bay Point, CA. One shot near American Airlines Center in Dallas, TX.
• So, a fairly normal weekend of gun violence in the USA. Reminder: these are not ALL the shootings from Friday and Saturday; just those I see in a quick scroll of news, and it doesn’t include police shootings, suicides, or accidental shootings.
• Those happen all the time too.
• If you don’t like it, use your power to vote for candidates who support common sense gun regulation.
• A little follow-up to Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) GOP response to Biden’s SOTU speech. It was hilariously lampooned on the cold open to SNL last night, by the way.
• But I just wanted to mention that Britt’s office admitted that the horrible sex trafficking story she used to illustrate Biden’s border policy was indeed that of Karla Jacinto Romero, who was forced to work in brothels in Mexico from 2004-2008 while George W. Bush was president.
• It’s a terrible story, but it happened 20 years ago in a different country while a different person was president.
• And now, The Weather: “Reground the Garden” by German Error Message
• Let’s do a chart. I enjoyed checking out the bottom of an album chart yesterday. Let’s do it again today, except it’s the bottom of the Hot 100 singles chart from 40 years ago in March 1983.
• I must admit, not only am I not familiar with many of these songs, but also feel I’ve never heard of a good number of these artists and bands. But they, unlike 99.999999% of all musicians, can say they had a song on the charts.
• 81. Remember What You Like (Jenny Burton). 82. Runaway (Bon Jovi). 83. Club Michelle (Eddie Money). 84. Body Talk (The Deele). 85. Hyperactive (Thomas Dolby). 86. Flashes (Tiggi Clay). 87. The Dream (Irene Cara). 88. You're Looking Like Love To Me (Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack). 89. Do You Love Me (Andy Fraser). 90. The Sun And The Rain (Madness). 91. Each Word's A Beat Of My Heart (Mink De Ville). 92. It's Gonna Be Special (Patti Austin). 93. No Parking (On The Dance Floor) (Midnight Star). 94. Twist Of Fate (Olivia Newton-John). 95. Taxi (J. Blackfoot). 96. Time Will Reveal (Debarge). 97. Baby I Lied (Deborah Allen). 98. Stay With Me Tonight (Jeffrey Osborne). 99. The Curly Shuffle (Jump 'n The Saddle). 100. Nightbird (Stevie Nicks).
• From the Sports Desk… the top 20 NFL quarterbacks in history based on career passing yards.
• 1. Tom Brady (89,214). 2. Drew Brees (80,358). 3. Peyton Manning (71,940). 4. Brett Favre (71,838). 5. Ben Roethlisberger (64,088). 6. Philip Rivers (63,440). 7. Matt Ryan (62,792). 8. Dan Marino (61,361). 9. Aaron Rodgers (59,055). 10. Eli Manning (57,023). 11. Matthew Stafford (56,047). 12. John Elway (51,475). 13. Warren Moon (49,325). 14. Fran Tarkenton (47,003). 15. Carson Palmer (46,247). 16. Vinny Testaverde (46,233). 17. Drew Bledsoe (44,611). 18. Joe Flacco (43,936). 19. Russell Wilson (43,653). 20. Dan Fouts (43,040).
• Today in history… After establishing the city of Santo Domingo, Christopher Columbus departs for Spain, leaving his brother in command (1496). Charles I dissolves the Parliament of England, beginning the eleven-year period known as the Personal Rule (1629). An agreement between Nader Shah and Russia is signed near Ganja, Azerbaijan and Russian troops are withdrawn from occupied territories (1735). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is ratified by the United States Senate, ending the Mexican–American War (1848). The first successful test of a telephone is made by Alexander Graham Bell (1876). Mahatma Gandhi is arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison (1922). Mildred Gillars, aka "Axis Sally”, is convicted of treason (1949). Fearing an abduction attempt by China, thousands of Tibetans surround the Dalai Lama's palace to prevent his removal (1959). In Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. (1969). Astronomers discover the rings of Uranus (1977). Silicon Valley Bank collapses due to a run on its deposits, in the second largest bank failure in US history (2023).
• March 10 is the birthday of poet/critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772), educator/activist Hallie Quinn Brown (1849), sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876), businessman Alfred Peet (1920), basketball player Marques Haynes (1926), actor/martial artist Chuck Norris (1940), songwriter/guitarist Tom Scholz (1947), director/screenwriter Paul Haggis (1953), terrorist Osama bin Laden (1957), model/actress Shannon Tweed, (1957), actress Sharon Stone (1958), songwriter/bass player Jeff Ament (1963), music producer Rick Rubin (1963), NFL player Rod Woodson (1965), singer-songwriter Edie Brickell (1966), actor Jon Hamm (1971), singer-songwriter Robin Thicke (1977), singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood (1983), actress Olivia Wilde (1984), actress Ego Nwodim (1988), and NFL player Justin Herbert (1998).

Time to hop in the shower and get dressed and do things. My task of the day is setting up the security system we acquired for the house awhile back, so if tomorrow’s news starts with my injuries from falling off a ladder, I won’t have to explain why. Enjoy your day.