Random News: June 5, 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 June 5, 2025, and it’s a Thursday for some reason. Underrated coffee choice: Peet’s Big Bang. Damn, this shit is delicious. Speaking of coffee… better go get a fresh cup, because we’re gonna be here for awhile.

• A Pride Note…
• If you’re scared of gay people because one of them might “turn you gay,” there’s a name for that.
• It’s called being gay. You’re fucking gay. Otherwise, you’d have zero concern about being hit on by a member of your own gender.
• Over my life, I’ve had dozens — hundreds? — of people knock on my door and tell me that I should believe in their religion. Never once have I had a person ring my doorbell to tell me to be gay.
• I’ve had countless people stop by to try and sell me new digital data services. I’ve had military members try to recruit me into joining an armed service. But I never was recruited by anyone to be gay. Not once.
• And I’m a sexy-assed motherfucker. If gays were going to have an agenda to recruit straight guys, it would have been me. And it would have been flattering, had it ever happened. Keep that in mind.
• Hot Tip: also, if you’re opposed to gay marriage, the next time a gay person proposes to you, just say no. Problem solved.
• Let’s do some news. We have a lot of it. Like, this might be my longest Random News column ever. No reason. Life happens at various speeds.
• Starting with bad news for Dump (which is good news for the rest of us)…
• Yesterday, U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that the Dump administration must give more than 100 migrants sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador a chance to challenge their deportations.
• Boasberg said that people who were sent to the prison in March under an 18th-century wartime law haven’t been able to formally contest the removals or allegations that they are members of a Venezuelan gang. He ordered the administration to work toward giving them a way to file those challenges.
• Boasberg gave the administration one week to come up with a manner in which the “at least 137" people can make those claims, even while they’re formally in the custody of El Salvador. 
• We’ll wait and see if Dump obeys this legal ruling or ignores them like a fascist piece of shit.
• You probably recall back in march when Boasberg ordered Dump to turn around the planes carrying the illegally deported immigrants.
• This demand was ignored, and El Salvador President (and good pal of Dump) Nayib Bukele then taunted the American justice system on social media — reposted by some of Dump’s top aides — saying, “Oopsie, too late.”
• We’re moving on to more bad news for Dumpy Doo Doo Pants.
• Yesterday, the Dump administration lost a bid to lift a federal judge’s order temporarily blocking the U.S. Education Department from laying off about half of its more than 4,000 employees.
• Fuck off, losers.
• Dumpy had asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the preliminary injunction that stayed the large “reduction in force” at the department announced by Education Secretary Linda McMahon in March.
• But a three-judge panel on that appeals court rejected that effort yesterday in a 26-page decision.
• Ha ha!
• Next, Dumpy will likely whine to the Supreme Court, like he always does. He’s like that kid who tells on you to your parents and the school principal when he gets butthurt.
• If the injunction remains in place, the Education Department will be blocked from drastically cutting its workforce, at least while lawsuits challenging the layoffs play out in the district court and appellate courts.
• And those lawsuits were filed by 21 states, five labor organizations, and two school districts. They allege that the reduction in force violates the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.
• Fuck ‘em up.
• Moving on.
• I don’t like Dump talking to Putin. Nothing good can ever come of that. But Dumpy said he did just that for an hour and 15 minutes yesterday about Ukraine's recent strikes on Russian aircraft and about nuclear talks with Iran.
• Dump said Putin had vowed during the call to respond to Ukraine's drone strikes. "President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields," reported Dump, probably very happy about this.
• In regard to Iran, Dump said, "President Putin suggested that he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could, perhaps, be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion.”
• I’m going to say that one, Putin didn’t say that, two, there will be no rapid conclusion, and three, Dump’s going to set up this Iran nuclear situation as a wag-the-dog scenario when he needs a big distraction.
• Let’s just move on.
• Dumpy, a busy little fascist boy as of late, is resurrecting the travel ban policy from his first term. He signing a proclamation last night preventing people from a dozen countries from entering the United States.
• The countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
• And in addition to the ban, there will be heightened restrictions on visitors from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
• There’s no real justifiable reason for bans on most of these countries, many of whom pose no major threat to the West.
• Shrug.
• And in related news…
• Dumples the Lonely Clown is also moving to block nearly all foreign students from entering the country to attend Harvard University specifically.
• I don’t remember former presidents singling out specific schools or businesses with vindictive acts, do you? Like, George W. Bush wouldn’t have done this.
• But in an executive order signed yesterday, Dump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students on its campus in Cambridge, MA.
• Literally everyone knows this is bullshit. There are plenty of schools with a higher percentage and number of foreign student enrollment compared to Harvard. The reason is indefensible and probably false.
• Moving on once again.
• How else did Donnie spend his busy Wednesday?
• He ordered his administration to investigate former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign pardons and other documents.
• He’s also asking for an investigation into Biden’s cognitive decline. What’s the real story here?
• Dump noted that Biden’s “actions” included the appointment of 225 federal judges. That should tell you what’s going on: Dump wants an excuse to fire every judge that was appointed by Biden.
• What a fucking asshole. Again, I don’t remember Bill Clinton doing investigations of George H.W Bush, or Reagan investigating Jimmy Carter.
• This isn’t how American democracy works.
• Let’s move on.
• Yesterday, Dump raised tariffs on aluminum and steel to 50%. This is going to immediately increase costs on everything from homes and cars to household and office supplies.
• It’s the same as the rest of the Dump tariff taxes: the levies will raise cost of manufacturing on a wide range of products, making many items more expensive to buy. Then businesses are forced to pass on most or all of tariff-related costs to consumers through higher prices.
• Don’t believe me? Then believe Wayne Winegarden, director at the Pacific Research Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
• ”That will hurt the people working in those industries and put their jobs under stress. And it also is going to put pressure on consumers, because those prices are going to increase."
• Well, there you go.
• You know, something to consider, courtesy of our old buddy Bernie Sanders (I-VT)…
• “If Musk & his pals are so concerned about increasing the national debt in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, why don't they cut the $664 billion in tax breaks for the 1%; the $420 billion in tax breaks for large profitable corporations; & the $150 billion in increased military spending?”
• Yes how about that?
• Speaking of Musk…
• Once he had something personal at stake from Dump’s Big Bullshit Bill, Elon lost his shit.
• He’s now in an all-out war to try and stop the spending bill as it stands — because the bill is killing tax credits for electric vehicles.
• The House version of the tax measure calls for largely ending the popular $7,500 electric car subsidies by the end of 2025 that Tesla has benefited from for years.
• And Elon put Dumpy on blast yesterday, posting, "Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.”
• Hahahaha.
• And this morning, Tesla stock slumped again as the fallout between Dumpy and Mucky became more public.
• Fuck both of those assholes.
• Final note for now about the Big Bullshit Bill…
• Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the House-passed Republican reconciliation package along with other federal policies expected to take effect will increase the number of uninsured people in the country by 16 million.
• Let’s move on.
• I have an immigration story that’s very close to home. I mean that literally.
• I live in a city called Redondo Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles. The city due east of me, with a border just a few hundred yards away from my door, is called Torrance.
• And that’s where 4th grader Martir Garcia Lara goes to school, at Torrance Elementary. Or, at least he did until last weekend.
• That’s when, during a visit to Texas, Dump’s masked and jackbooted ICE agents detained him at an immigration hearing, and then separated him from his dad.
• "He’s alone and he’s not able to return home," said Jasmin King, PTA president at his school.
• During the immigration hearing in Houston, both father and son were grabbed by ICE and then cruelly separated from each other.
• I bring up this story because it’s about a little kid who lives here in my area — but it’s just one of thousands occurring all across the country as Dump panders to his hateful, xenophobic base.
• Moving on.
• In news from the Climate Desk…
• I happened to catch a fascinating weather report out of South Florida.
• Meteorologist John Morales got on the air this week, but instead of delivering the next day’s temperatures and precipitation chances, he spent the time warning how National Weather Service (NWS) shortages will impact his forecasts.
• In a segment on local NBC affiliate WTVJ, Morales talked about previous coverage of a hurricane in 2019, saying, “confidently, I went on TV, and I told you, ‘It’s going to turn. You don’t need to worry; it is going to turn.’”
• But then he added, “And I am here to tell you, that I am not sure I can do that this year, because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.”
• Morales — a veteran award-winning meteorologist — spilled the beans. “Did you know that Central and South Florida National Weather Service offices are currently basically 20 to 40 percent understaffed? From Tampa to Key West, including the Miami office, 20 to 40 percent understaffed.”
• He made it clear that as a result, for the first time in his long career, he couldn’t guarantee that the crucial emergency weather info he was tasked with relaying to the public during the hurricane season would be accurate or timely.
• Fucking awful. And totally unnecessary. When weather disasters happen and there’s death and destruction that could have been averted, remember that Dumpy and his boss Elon wanted it that way.
• Same with when there’s no FEMA staff or resources to help after the fact.
• Let’s keep moving on.
• In a story that would make any normal human being sickened, Los Angeles County agreed to pay $2.7 million to a teenager who was attacked by at least six other young people at a juvenile detention center in so-called “gladiator fights” that were facilitated by probation officers .
• The boy’s beating in 2023 at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall was captured on surveillance video, which shows a 16-year-old boy being attacked by at least six other people, who came at him one by one as officers stand by watching.
• Then the cops shook hands with the participants in the beating.
• A state grand jury in March charged 30 correctional officers for their role in allowing and encouraging nearly 70 fights to take place between July and December 2023. The officers face charges including child endangerment and abuse, conspiracy, and battery.
• More than 140 victims between the ages of 12 and 18 were involved. Attorney General Rob Bonta said after the charges were announced that the attacks were planned.
• Mooooooving on.
• A story from the Technology Desk that should be very interesting to some of you.
• Yesterday, Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally scraping the comments of millions of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.
• We’re fucking doomed.
• Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access Reddit's content despite being asked not to do so, and "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent."
• This is more weird than you realize.
• Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that are paying to be able to train their AI systems on the public commentary of Reddit's more than 100 million daily users. Yikes. With me so far?
• The Claude chatbot remains a key competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Anthropic's primary commercial partner is Amazon, which is using Claude to improve its widely-used Alexa voice assistant.
• And much like other AI companies, Anthropic has relied heavily on websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit that are deep troves of written materials that can help teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language.
• So what I’m basically saying is that AI — which will be guiding a huge portion of our world in the near future — is learning about humanity via the fucking Reddit comment section.
• You ever look at comment sections?
• Side note: Anthropic is already battling a lawsuit from major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
• These people have zero respect for either intellectual property nor the rights of people to be aware of the use of the content they create. If they could mine the thoughts right out of your head — and not pay you a dime — they would.
• The only saving grace? Those of us who create content of any kind — or maybe write daily random news columns — are currently having a huge influence on the “thought process” of AI, now and in the future.
• Because you can bet your ass, they’re scraping this shit too.
• And now, The Weather: “Laughter” by Couch Prints
• From the Sports Desk… the exciting game 1 of the NHL’s Stanley Cup finals was last night. The Oilers went to overtime to beat the Panthers 4-3 and take a 1-0 lead in the series.
• Game 2 is tomorrow.
• And with the NBA Finals starting tonight with Game 1 between the Pacers and Thunder, ESPN’s panel of experts made their picks for the series.
• Out of 15 basketball gurus, 14 of them have Oklahoma City winning their first championship since 1979, when they were known as the Seattle Supersonics.
• Just one picked Indiana, who has never won a title.
• From the Sports Desk follies…
• Finland women's national soccer team manager apologized for mistakenly calling up a long-retired 51-year-old for this week's game against Serbia.
• They intended to sign 23-year-old defender Nanne Ruuskanen. Instead, when submitting the lineup, the manager entered former player Stina Ruuskanen (no relation), who last played on the national level 29 years ago in 1996.
• The elder Ruuskanen seemed to enjoy the mixup.
• "I'm definitely ready if the call comes! Just yesterday I was playing in a hobby league match… so my game feel is good," she jested.
• Today in history… The Qing dynasty Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor take Beijing during the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1644). Houston is incorporated by the Republic of Texas (1837). Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper (1851). Denmark amends its constitution to allow women's suffrage (1915). Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the first American Jew to hold such a position (1916). In a speech at Harvard University, the United States Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to war-torn Europe, aka the Marshall Plan (1947). Elvis Presley introduces his new single, "Hound Dog", on ‘The Milton Berle Show’, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements (1956). Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan (1968). The ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’ of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles, CA, have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS (1981). The Tank Man halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (1989). The Bose–Einstein condensate is first created (1995). Montenegro becomes the 29th member of NATO (2017).
• June 5 is the birthday of Mexican general/politician Pancho Villa (1878), economist John Maynard Keynes (1883), shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo (1898), physicist Dennis Gabor (1900), author/illustrator Richard Scarry (1919), journalist Bill Moyers (1934), Canadian prime minister Joe Clark (1939), singer-songwriter Laurie Anderson (1947), saxophonist Kenny G (1956), actor Jeff Garlin (1962), astronomer Michael E. Brown (1965), actor Ron Livingston (1967), NHL player Martin Gélinas (1970), actor/rapper Mark Wahlberg (1971), NBA player Zydrunas Ilgauskas (1975), NFL player Torry Holt (1976), actor Nick Kroll (1978), singer-songwriter/bass player Pete Wentz (1979), and NFL player Sam Darnold (1997).

Whew… that was a giant assload of news. But like I said, if I see stuff that I think might be important or informative to you, and I have the time and the inclination to include it, I do. Side note: this is my final news report — as a young and handsome 55-year-old. Enjoy your day.