Random News: May 25, 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 May 25, 2024, and it’s a Saturday. It’s also, at least here in the USA, the start of a three-day holiday weekend, which is pretty fucking awesome. I’ve had some interesting things happen and perhaps I’ll mention those later, but for now, the news.

• Following up on a big story we mentioned earlier this week, yesterday Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law the state’s insane new legislation that classifies two abortion-inducing drugs as controlled and dangerous substances, like fentanyl and meth.
• The measure — the first of its kind — affects the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, which are used in medication abortions, the most common method of abortion in the country.
• In Louisiana, since the repeal of Roe v. Wade, there’s been a near-total abortion ban making it impossible to get one even in cases of rape or incest. Anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal there can go to jail for 15 years.
• If you do have the baby, by choice or otherwise, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Louisiana is also near at the top of in infant mortality rates.
• Just… do not get pregnant in Louisiana, whatever you do.
• The bill was originally positioned as a way to protect pregnant people by making it a crime to intentionally give an abortion-inducing drug to a pregnant woman without her consent, and yes, that seems like a reasonable idea.
• Except that’s hardly ever happened, and this was just an excuse to ban the drugs entirely and remove all access to women’s reproductive freedom in the state.
• The new classification requires doctors to have a specific license to prescribe the drugs, and the drugs would have to be stored in certain facilities that in some cases could end up being located far from rural clinics.
• Mifepristone and misoprostol have other common uses, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor, and stopping hemorrhaging.
• Let’s move on.
• Two Democratic senators are requesting a meeting with Chief Justice John Roberts after reports that two separate flags carried by insurrectionists at the January 6, 2021 failed coup attempt at the Capitol had flown outside of houses owned by Justice Samuel Alito.
• Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Judiciary panel, wrote Roberts on Thursday asking him for a meeting to discuss Supreme Court ethics.
• Specifically, they want to take steps to ensure that Alito recuses himself from any cases before the court concerning the January 6 attack or on Dump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
• Alito’s wife told a reporter at the time that the inverted American flag flown at the couple’s house in January 2021 was “an international signal of distress.”
• “We request a meeting with you as soon as possible, in your capacity as Chief Justice and as presiding officer of the Judicial Conference of the United States, to discuss additional steps to address the Supreme Court’s ethics crisis,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote to Roberts in a letter released yesterday.
• Here’s hoping, though I’m not very optimistic anything will happen.
• Moving on to something more pressing.
• When Dumpy falsely claimed in a fundraising email on Wednesday that President Biden was “locked & loaded and ready to take me out,” special counsel Jack Smith moved swiftly.
• Yesterday, Smith asked federal judge Aileen Cannon for an immediate gag order, insisting that Dump’s reckless comments not only could spur violence but also violated his terms of release after his indictment.
• So here’s the deal.
• Smith knows that Cannon, being a Dump loyalist, will deny the gag order. That’s what Smith is counting on, because then he’ll petition the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to have her removed from the case.
• As you know, El Dumpo is charged in that case with taking classified national defense documents from the White House after he left office, and then obstructing the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials.
• Cannon has blatantly slow-walked the case to protected Dump from a trial before the November election.
• In two previous instances in the case, Cannon has been rebuked by the 11th Circuit, and experts believe this could be strike three.
• Let’s fucking go.
• Moving on.
• Families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting that happened two years ago yesterday are suing the manufacturer of the gun used in the attack, the maker of a video game, and Instagram parent company Meta.
• It seems like a long shot to me, but the premise is interesting.
• The companies are accused of being responsible for “grooming” a generation of young people who live out violent video game fantasies in the real world, with easily accessible weapons of war.
• The lawsuits contend that Meta’s Instagram and Activision’s Call of Duty game knowingly exposed the killer to the gun he used at Uvalde and conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems.
• The gunman had been playing CoD since he was 15 years old, and simultaneously the subject of aggressive marketing by Daniel Defense, the AR-15 style weapon manufacturer which targeted the teen with ads on Instagram, per the suit.
• They’re not wrong. I just don’t know if the directness of the harm can be legally proven.
• Again, here’s hoping.
• Let’s take a look at South Dakota, the state run by Governor and puppy murderer Kristi Noem. 
• A new state policy there to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.
• Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks.
• But both received written warnings from the university that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents, and were told that they would be suspended or immediately terminated if they didn’t comply.
• As of this week, Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is now banned from all nine tribal lands in the state. She is not allowed to set foot in nearly 20 percent of South Dakota.
• Good.
• And now, The Weather: “Empires Never Know” by Jessica Pratt
• The “interesting thing” I referred to up top was that yesterday, for the first time, I made contact with someone in the family of my biological father.
• Nothing big so far, but now at least they do know I exist, and that I share DNA with them because of reasons of… science.
• I’ve traded a couple of messages with a niece and provided my contact info if they want to reach out and learn more about me.
• The whole thing is a trip. I’m fine regardless of whatever transpires next, if anything.
• From the Sports Desk… let’s go back to the NHL’s Stanley Cup conference finals.
• In the East, the new York Rangers and Florida Panthers are tied 1-1. The Western Conference has the Edmonton Oilers with a 1-0 lead over the Dallas Stars, with Game 2 tonight.
• Today in history… The Diet of Worms ends when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, issues the Edict of Worms, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw (1521). A treaty between Pennsylvania and Maryland ends the Conojocular War with settlement of a boundary dispute and exchange of prisoners (1738). Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ opens at the Opera Comique in London (1878). Playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and sentenced to serve two years in prison (1895). John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching human evolution in Tennessee (1925). The Walt Disney Company cartoon Three Little Pigs premieres at Radio City Music Hall, featuring the hit song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (1933). At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only nuclear artillery test (1953). The first public television station in the United States officially begins broadcasting as KUHT from the campus of the University of Houston (1953). U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces, before a special joint session of the U.S. Congress, his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the Moon" before the end of the decade (1961). The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, is dedicated (1968). Star Wars is released in theaters (1977). The Hands Across America event takes place (1986). Oprah Winfrey airs her last show, ending her 25-year run of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ (2011). Ireland votes to repeal the Eighth Amendment of their constitution that prohibits abortion in all but a few cases (2018).
• May 26 is the birthday of US speaker of the house/SCOTUS justice Philip P. Barbour (1783), poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803), actress Marie Doro (1882), aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky (1889), Burma prime minister U Nu (1907), songwriter Hal David (1921), actor Claude Akins (1926), NBA player Bill Sharman (1926), soprano Beverly Sills (1929), NBA player K. C. Jones (1932), actor Ian McKellen (1939), puppeteer/actor/director Frank Oz (1944), singer-songwriter Klaus Meine (1948), singer-songwriter Paul Weller (1958), politician Amy Klobuchar (1960), actor Mike Myers (1963), actress Anne Heche (1969), and NFL player Brian Urlacher (1978).

That’s enough news and whatnot for now. Enjoy your day.