Random News: April 7, 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 April 7, 2024, and it’s a Sunday. Once again, I’m up and dressed, as if I wasn’t a lazy slob who usually spends weekend mornings in a bathrobe. It’s just been kinda chilly here in the LA region and it’s more comfortable after a hot shower and in jeans and a flannel. I’ve got some coffee, so let’s check the news.

• Today marks the 6-month point of the Israel-Hamas War, and while there have been a few momentary reasons for hope, no one can say with any certainty when it will end, or how.
• More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in that six month span. But that’s probably just the start.
• Between siege, bombardment, and ground offensive, the crisis of near starvation is near. Several hundred thousand Palestinians in northern Gaza face imminent famine, with little aid able to reach them.
• An influx of refugees has swelled the area’s southernmost city of Rafah to some 1.4 million people, some five times the normal population. And Israel is expanding its offensive to that location next.
• There’s very little I can write here to sugarcoat it. Historically, it’s not going to be viewed in any kind of positive light… not even by the Israeli people, who have differing priorities between getting their hostages back to wiping Hamas off the planet.
• Here’s hoping this resolves at the earliest opportunity, with as little genocide as possible.
• Moving on.
• Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) confirmed this morning that some of his fellow members of Congress were parroting Russian propaganda in discussing the Russia-Ukraine war on the House floor.
• Turner said, “There are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not. Vladimir Putin having made it very clear, both publicly and to his own population, that his view is that this is a conflict of a much broader claim of Russia to Eastern Europe, including claiming all of Ukrainian territories as Russian.”\
• Which makes you think long and hard about people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) who has made it a top priority to prevent Congress from approving more aid to Ukraine.
• She recently threatened to hold a vote to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson should he hold a vote on Ukraine aid.
• Maybe someday we’ll find out the whole story of the people who were trying to bring down the USA from both the inside and out. Maybe not. You never know.
• Let’s move on.
• Tomorrow is the big day… the Great North American Eclipse.
• I’ve spoken about it a lot in the past week. My only reminder to you: just because you’re not directly in the path of totality doesn’t mean you should ignore it. I’m near Los Angeles; we’ll still have about a 50% partial eclipse here.
• Enjoy the detailed quality of light changing, which will be the case in varying degrees of subtlety across about 90% of Mexico, the USA, and Canada.
• It’ll be cool.
• And if you’re lucky enough to be in that diagonal strip of land heading northeastward from Texas up to Maine, please don’t blow it off. Get outside and see for yourself. For many people, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
• In other news…
• I want to mention two women who recently almost died due to being refused medical help inn states that have banned and severely curtailed abortion rights.
• Amanda Zurawski, 37, of Austin, TX had been in her second trimester, after 18 months of fertility treatments, when she went into early labor and was told the baby would not survive. 
• Doctors said they could not intervene to provide an abortion because Zurawski wasn’t in enough medical danger.
• Three days later, her condition rapidly worsened and she developed sepsis. She stabilized just long enough to deliver a stillborn girl, then spent days in an ICU.
• Kaitlyn Joshua of Louisiana was having a second baby with her husband. But she started to experience bleeding and serious pain at about 11 weeks.
• But at an emergency room in Baton Rouge, doctors wouldn’t confirm she was miscarrying or discuss medical options, and sent her home. The bleeding worsened; she went to a second hospital; doctors sent her home.
• She had to find a midwife just to confirm she had miscarried. She was given no medical treatment.
• Both women are now campaigning for President Joe Biden in places like North Carolina and Wisconsin to meet with doctors, local officials and voters. They will focus on how women’s health is being affected by the overturning of federal abortion protections.
• Over 66% of Americans say abortion should generally be legal. About one-quarter say abortion should always be legal, but only 1 in 10 say it should always be illegal.
• Donnie Dump has, on multiple occasions, taken the credit for having overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that gave reproductive freedom to woman for almost 50 years between 1973-2022, when Dump’s hand-picked Supreme Court reversed the decision.
• The Republican agenda for next year and beyond starts with making abortion illegal in all 50 states, along with contraception. Don’t let it happen, people.
• Let’s move on to my least-favorite feature, Sunday Gunday.
• Three dead and three wounded in three separate shootings on the same day in Stockton, CA. Two dead and seven more shot at a nightclub in Doral, FL. Two dead in a murder-suicide in Cedar Park, TX. One dead, two injured in a club shooting in NW Oklahoma City, OK. One dead, one injured in a shooting in Emporia, VA. One dead, one injured in a shooting in north Minneapolis, MN. One shot dead at a shopping mall in Cerritos, CA. One shot dead near an apartment complex in Littleton, CO. One shot dead in the West Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, IL. A woman shot dead in Dallas, TX. One shot dead at a Walmart in San Antonio, TX. One shot dead at a shopping center in DeKalb County, GA. One shot dead in downtown Salinas, CA. One shot dead in St. Louis, MO. Six shot on the Northeast Side of San Antonio, TX. Two shot on I-71 in north Columbus, OH. One shot and in critical condition in Kansas City, MO. A woman shot in Covington, WA. One shot in the Magnolia Parks neighborhood of Houston, TX. One shot in Glendale, AZ.
• There’s always more but I don’t like spending my whole day on this shit.
• And yes, these are just for the past two days. You don’t have to accept it. You could vote for politicians who support reasonable gun control measures.
• And now, The Weather: “Orb weaver” by Draag
• From the Sports Desk… we have an NCAA Men’s Championship matchup.
• Yesterday, 1-seed Purdue beat 11-seed NC State 63-50, and 1-seed UConn beat 4-seed Alabama 86-72.
• These two top-seeded teams will meet in the championship tomorrow evening. And then I can get back to ignoring college sports for 11 months.
• In other Sports Desk news, congrats to the newest inductees into the basketball Hall of Fame.
• They include players Vince Carter, Chauncey Billups, Seimone Augustus, Michael Cooper, Walter Davis, Dick Barnett and Michele Timms; executive Jerry West (who was already inducted as a player and as a member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic team); coaches Charles Smith, Harley Redin, and Bo Ryan; broadcaster/coach Doug Collins; and owner Herb Simon.
• All well deserved.
• Today in history… Attila the Hun captures Metz in France, killing most of its inhabitants and burning the town (451). Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Cebu (1521). Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's ‘St John Passion’, BWV 245, at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig (1724). The French First Republic adopts the kilogram and gram as its primary unit of mass (1795). The Mississippi Territory is organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and the Spanish Empire (1798). Ludwig van Beethoven premieres his Third Symphony at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna (1805). The Union's Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio defeat the Confederate Army of Mississippi near Shiloh, TN (1862). Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples (1906). AT&T transmits the first long-distance public television broadcast, from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displaying the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover (1927). Nazi Germany issues the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banning Jews and political dissidents from civil service posts (1933). Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp (1940). The National Football League makes helmets mandatory (1943). The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations (1948). IBM announces the System/360 (1964). The Internet's symbolic birth date: Publication of RFC 1 (1969). During STS-6, astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson perform the first Space Shuttle spacewalk (1983). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announces that the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant has become the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States (2021). Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed for the Supreme Court of the United States, becoming the first black female justice (2022).
• April 7 is the birthday of poet William Wordsworth (1770), businessman Will Keith Kellogg (1860), journalist/activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890), journalist Walter Winchell (1897), composer/bandleader Percy Faith (1908), singer-songwriter Billie Holiday (1915), sitar player Ravi Shankar (1920), actor James Garner (1928), actor Wayne Rogers (1933), politician Jerry Brown (1938), trumpet player Freddie Hubbard (1938), film director/producer Francis Ford Coppola (1939), singer-songwriter John Oates (1948), singer-songwriter Janis Ian (1951), martial artist/actor Jackie Chan (1954), NFL player Tony Dorsett (1954), actor Russell Crowe (1964), NFL player Ronde Barber (1975), NFL player Tiki Barber (1975), and MLB player Adrián Beltré (1979).

Good enough. Enjoy your day.