Random News: April 13, 2025

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 13, 2025, and it’s a Sunday. I’ve just brewed a perfect cup of Peet’s Brazil — a medium roast — and now, ensconced in my bathrobe, I will see what’s going on in this wacky-ass world.

• I’ll start with some good news/bad news about yesterday.
• The bad news: I woke up not feeling at all well yesterday morning, but I still got myself ready to head out the door for yesterday’s “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here” event with Bernie Sanders, AOC, and many others. It was just such a once-in-a lifetime experience that I was willing to put up with a little pain to be in attendance.
• But by the time we were getting ready to head out the door, news reports were already coming in about how so many people were pouring into downtown LA that all parking lots in the area were full and they were having to close streets.
• And I had to admit that I wasn’t up for the challenge of making it in and out of that level of crowded madness. So — disappointingly, I must tell you — I opted to stay home and stream the whole thing instead.
• Which I did, start to finish, and I’ll be writing up a separate report about it.
• But the bigger point is that it was the biggest stop on Bernie’s tour. Bernie had posted there were some 36,000 people in attendance, but the LA County Sheriff office posted that it was over 60,000, which seemed more in line with what I was seeing.
• Millions more heard the messaging via social media and YouTube and news reports.
• So while I’d have really preferred to be there in person and feel that energy live, it was an incredibly successful event for the most important cause of our lifetimes: keeping the USA a democracy with better living conditions for us all, and refusing to allow the country to become a fascist dictatorship under Dump.
• Let’s do some news.
• Yesterday, lawyers for Kilmar Abrego García  — the Maryland father of three mistakenly deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador — asked a federal judge to order the Justice Department to show why it should not be held in contempt for failing to say what it has done (or will do) to immediately return Abrego García to the United States after a Supreme Court order.
• At 5pm yesterday, U.S. State Department official Michael G. Kozak confirmed that 29-year-old García is being held in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center under that country’s sovereign authority. Hopefully that’s a confirmation that he’s also still alive. 

• However, the government still did not update U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis about what concrete steps it is taking to bring him home, as she had ordered Friday.
• As you know, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously 9-0 on Thursday evening that the government must bring him back.
• His lawyers also asked Xinis to order the government to show by Monday morning why it should not be found in contempt for violating the judge’s earlier orders to lay out its actions to repatriate Abrego García.
• We’ll continue to keep this a top story until Abrego García is home safe with his family.
• Let’s move on.
• We’ve done plenty of coverage of the upheaval in the stock market due to Dumpy’s ineptitude, but one economic indicator we haven’t discussed — perhaps an even bigger problem — is bonds.
• I don’t claim to know much about this stuff.
• But what I do understand is that typically when stocks go down, bonds go up. But this time, investors are dumping U.S. government bonds.
• The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds, and traders are losing faith in America as a stable, predictable, good place to store their money.
• It’s very bad news for taxpayers paying interest on the ballooning U.S. debt, consumers taking out mortgages or car loans — and bad news for Dumpy, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets.
• What are they? Treasury bonds are essentially IOUs from the U.S. government, and they’re how Washington pays its bills despite collecting less in revenue than it spends.
• Bonds are supposed to move in the opposite direction as stocks, rising when stocks are falling. In this way, they act like shock absorbers to 401(k)s and other portfolios in stock market meltdowns, compensating somewhat for the losses.
• But that’s not happening this time, and it’s a fucking problem.
• Thanks a lot, Dumpy.
• Back to the tariffs for a moment.
• If you take a look at what has historically happened as a result of trade wars, there’s a very good chance that Dump’s economic idiocy will boomerang on Republicans politically in 2026 due to rising prices and shrinking growth.
• Republican senators are pointing to the 1932 and 1982 elections as historical examples of when trade wars and resulting price inflation hurt their party at the ballot box, and they are worried that history could repeat itself.
• They should be. That’s the reason that they’re working hard to disenfranchise as many voters as possible between now and fall 2026.
• Tariffs are simply a tax hike on American consumers. Republican lawmakers note that the last two times Congress enacted tax hikes on the scale of Trump’s recent tariffs, the president’s party suffered a wipeout in the next election.\
• Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) pointed out, “In the national elections, you can go back to 1982 when I think it was about 26 congressional seats that were lost by Republicans.”
• We’re actually aiming higher than that. I think it’s quite possible to add 40-50 Democrats to the House and 8-10 to the Senate if we just allow them to fuck up the country as they’re doing.
• And it can happen both ways. In 1994, Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate after then-President Clinton raised taxes by signing the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993.
• I probably don’t need to tell you that having a Democratic-controlled Congress would be a huge roadblock to Dump’s dreams of being a king.
• Moving on.
• Looks like Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is being allowed to access more sensitive Treasury Department information related to millions of Americans.
• Judge Jeannette A. Vargas said in a written opinion late Friday that one DOGE worker, Ryan Wunderly, can access sensitive payment and data systems if he completes training that Treasury employees typically go through before given such access and submits a financial disclosure report.
• So when all your private financial info leaks — like all of your Social Security info and bank account numbers — blame Elon and this random fucking guy named Ryan.
• In news from the International Desk…
• Russian missiles struck the heart of the Ukrainian city of Sumy as people gathered to celebrate Palm Sunday, killing at least 32 people. It’s the second large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine to claim civilian lives in just over a week.
• The two ballistic missiles hit around 10:15am this morning, local time. The dead included two children. A further 99 people were wounded, including 11 children.
• A reminder to all of you: Ukraine is a sovereign country that was invaded by Russia in 2022. If Russia faces no opposition, it will invade other European countries including Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia before continuing to take over all of Europe.
• Dump made numerous claims that if he won the presidency, that war would stop within 24 hours. Dump has been in office nearly 100 days and the conflict has only increased.
• Let’s move on.
• A note from the Health Desk…
• Measles — a disease that not long ago was considered eradicated in the USA — now tops  700 cases as of Friday, capping a week in which Indiana joined five others states with active outbreaks, Texas grew by another 60 cases, and a third measles-related death was made public.
• How could this have happened? It seemed so easily preventable.
• This is very simple. Over the last decade or so, conspiracy theorists received false information via social media that cast vaccines in a negative light.
• So fewer and fewer people — often in areas in the USA that were most susceptible to misleading and malicious info — vaccinated their children. And now here we are.
• And now we have a known anti-vaccine head of our nation’s health in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
• So now the U.S. has more than double the number of measles cases it saw in all of 2024, and Texas is reporting the majority of them with 541. Other states with active outbreaks include New Mexico, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
• From the Space Desk…
• You may have seen some very silly memes floating around talking about tonight’s “Pink Moon,” with pics in which the moon is tinted a bright rose color.
• That’s not a thing.
• Every full moon of the year has some nickname that was given to it by antiquity, spanning multiple times and cultures.
• A full moon in April was called the Pink Moon by native Americans because its arrival coincided with an abundance of pink flowers that bloomed this time of year.
• The moon itself is always the same.
• Though if you put on Nick Drake’s song “Pink Moon” just as the full moon rises tonight, you will notice a distinct feeling of calmness, tranquility, and oneness with the universe. 
• Try it.
• And now, The Weather: “Back To Me” by The Marías
• Been a bit since we did a word count. I started Zak’s Random News for no reason at all on May 17, 2022, coming up on three years ago.
• Our total word count since then: 1,698,991 words.
• So, typical novels range from 70,000 to 120,000 words, with the average hanging around 90,000. That’s about 19 novels’ worth of words here.
• All seven of the ‘Harry Potter’ books together are 1,084,625 words. All ‘Lord of the Rings’ books plus The Hobbit’? A mere 550,147 words.
• The classic cliche for a long book is ‘War and Peace’ at 587,287 words. I’ve done almost three of those by now.
• My next milestone? Surpassing George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, currently standing at 1,736,054 words. I’ll blow by that this summer.
• From the Sports Desk… today is the final day of the NBA regular season. Does it matter? Oh yes, it does.
• While most playoff seeding is pretty well set, there are still a number of teams whose post-season paths will be determined by today’s games.
• Case in point: only one game separates the records of the Lakers (50-31), Nuggets (49-32), Clippers (49-32), Warriors (48-33), and T’Wolves (48-33), so this final game will indeed impact whatever happens next.
• Today in history… Constantinople falls to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, temporarily ending the Byzantine Empire (1204). Samuel Argall, having captured Pocahontas in Passapatanzy, VA, sets off with her to Jamestown with the intention of exchanging her for English prisoners held by her father (1613). George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah makes its world premiere in Dublin, Ireland (1742). Raleigh, NC is occupied by Union forces in the American Civil War (1865). The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded (1870). Up to 150 black men are murdered in Colfax, LA while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan (1873). German WWII troops kill more than 1,000 political and military prisoners in Gardelegen, Germany (1945). CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program Project MKUltra (1953). The United States launches Transit 1-B, the world's first satellite navigation system (1960). Sidney Poitier becomes the first African-American man to win the Best Actor award for the film ‘Lilies of the Field’ (1964). An oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module explodes while en route to the Moon (1970). Tiger Woods becomes the youngest golfer to win the Masters Tournament (1997). The house of Jack Teixeira was raided in an investigation into leaked Pentagon documents, where he was later arrested on the same day (2023).
• April 13 is the birthday of soldier/terrorist Guy Fawkes (1570), US president Thomas Jefferson (1743), surgeon/radiologist Robert Abbe (1851), businessman Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852), criminal Butch Cassidy (1866), novelist/poet Samuel Beckett (1906), actor Don Adams (1923), poet/playwright Seamus Heaney (1939), actor Paul Sorvino (1939), composer/conductor Bill Conti (1942), singer-songwriter/pastor Al Green (1946), actor Ron Perlman (1950), singer Peabo Bryson (1951), drummer/bandleader Max Weinberg (1951), chess player Garry Kasparov (1963), actor Ricky Schroder (1970), NBA player Baron Davis (1979), and singer-songwriter/musician Ty Dolla Sign (1982).

As I mentioned, I’m writing a whole other report covering what I saw at yesterday’s Bernie Sanders rally. Even though I wasn’t physically there — which still pains me, but I’ll get over it — I watched every moment intently. It’s definitely worth talking about in detail. Enjoy your day.