Random News: August 25, 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 August 25, 2025, and it’s a Monday. You know what’s challenging? Waking up every day and doing normal shit in an abnormal world. Continuing to be productive in the mundane, daily responsibilities you have while the world is falling apart around you. But you know what they say: courage is the ability to keep on going when everything around you makes you feel like you can’t.

• Let’s be courageous today.
• And now, the news.
• Yesterday, Dumples the Dictator Clown threatened to expand his military deployments to more Democratic-led cities, responding to an offer by Maryland’s governor to join him in a tour of Baltimore by saying he might instead “send in the ‘troops.’”
• All this because he’s embarrassed about being outed as a child rapist. Talk about making a bad situation much, much worse.
• Dump’s latest pledge to ramp up the military’s presence in left-leaning cities came as at least some National Guard units in the nation’s capital began carrying weapons over the weekend, making good on a directive issued Friday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
• Dump made the threat to Baltimore in a spat with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat who has criticized Trump’s unprecedented — and likely illegal flex of federal power.
• A pertinent side note: Baltimore’s violent crime rate has fallen. The 200 homicides reported last year were down 24% from the prior year and 42% since 2021.
• As we’ve mentioned, Dump has repeatedly described many of the nation’s largest and most beloved cities — run by Democrats, with Black mayors and majority-minority populations — as dangerous and filthy.
• One of those places is Chicago — the third most populous city in the United States. Dump says he’ll deploy the military against our own citizens and other residents there.
• Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said the state was not experiencing any emergency that would warrant a National Guard presence like that which the Pentagon has been considering. Instead, Pritzker said, Dump was “attempting to manufacture a crisis.”
• JB is correct.
• If Dump’s mission to persecute the people of Chicago is approved by the Pentagon (which it will be, obviously), it will become the third U.S. city to face a recent deployment, coming on the heels of crackdowns in Los Angeles and D.C.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson noted that over the past year homicides were down by more than 30 percent and shootings by nearly 40 percent.
• The mayor added that the Dump administration had not yet contacted Chicago about federal law enforcement plans. Pritzker echoed that in his statement over the weekend, saying he had not received any outreach from federal officials nor sought their law enforcement support.
• Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Army veteran who served honorably in Iraq, reinforced the sentiments that a deployment in Chicago was unwarranted. In a statement yesterday, she called the Dump administration’s plans “deeply disturbing” and “un-American.”
• She’s right.
• Moving on for now.
• Some news from the Immigration Desk…
• As sadly expected, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and later returned to the U.S., was taken into federal custody this morning by immigration authorities.
• His arrest happened minutes after he walked into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Baltimore for a check-in after being released from federal custody on Friday.
• Talking to supporters gathered outside the building, Abrego Garcia said seeing his family over the weekend filled him with hope, and said those moments "will give me strength to continue fighting."
• "God is with us. God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all of the injustice we are suffering," Abrego Garcia said, fighting through tears.
• This morning, he filed a lawsuit challenging his current detention and any deportation until a trial is held at an immigration court.
• But minutes later, Kristi Noem, the women who shoots puppies in their heads as well as being the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said Abrego Garcia is being processed "for removal to Uganda."
• Why? Just to be cruel. That’s why they do what they do. The Dump government is filled with sexual deviants who masturbate to people’s misery. Especially Noem.
• Let’s move on.
• This morning, Dumpy says he signing two executive orders that are both shitty and almost certainly not legally enforceable.
• First, he wants only rich people to be allowed to get out of jail after being accused of a crime. He wants to eliminate cashless bail.
• He’s threatening that cities will lose "federal funding decisions, services, or approvals” if they don’t comply. He also said that Attorney General Pam Bondi could “get involved,” though the fat bastard didn’t detail what actions she might take.
• I’ll state the extremely obvious here: cash bail disproportionately hurts low-income people, who may have more difficulty securing the money to pay bail for release from jail.
• But wait! The Orange Man Who Won’t Be Around Much Longer is signing another executive order today, aiming at prosecuting people who "desecrate" the American flag.
• That order directs Bondi to "vigorously prosecute those who violate our laws in ways that involve desecrating the flag, and to pursue litigation to clarify the scope of First Amendment in this area."
• A history side note: it was in 1989 that the Supreme Court made its ruling in ‘Texas v. Johnson,’ a landmark decision in which the Court held that burning the Flag of the United States was protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as doing so counts as symbolic speech and political speech.
• Of course, this current shitty-ass Court would reverse that decision if it came to them. We can even tell you the score ahead of time: 6-3.
• Moving on.
• A brief side note in the congressional redistricting battle that’s shaping up in multiple states across the USA.
• Per the analysis of political and elections experts like Dave Wasserman (senior elections analyst for the Cook Political Report), even after the Republicans cheat by gerrymandering the fuck out of their states, there’s still no guarantee that the GOP will actually be able to hang on to enough seats to maintain control of the House.
• Wasserman says, “Democrats won 235 seats in 2018 on a map that was a little bit more skewed towards Republicans than the one that is in place currently. And we’re looking at a political environment that’s similar to 2018, based on the enthusiasm gap between the parties and the offyear election results so far.”
• See, here’s the thing. Any election where Dumpy himself is not on the ballot causes Republicans to not show up. We’ve seen it in a bunch of special elections in recent times.
• Wasserman adds, “That explains a lot of the turnout differential, because Republicans are having such a difficult time turning out voters who are loyal to Trump but not the Republican Party.”
• That makes a lot of sense. Now add in the people who’ve become disillusioned with Dump and the GOP due to their horrific actions over the past months, and you might have a recipe for a big Blue Wave takeover of the House in 2026.
• If they let us vote, that is.
• Without the House funding his agenda and pushing through his legislation, Dump (or whoever is the president in 2026, probably JD Vance) becomes the lamest of lame ducks.
• Let’s move on with some news from the “We’re All Going to Die” Desk…
• The United States military scrambled fighter jets yesterday to intercept a Russian spy plane flying near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.
• It was the third time in less than a week that U.S. forces deployed planes after a Russian plane was spotted inside the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone.
• But I thought Dumpy and Putin were best buddies. Wha happen?
• NORAD detected and tracked one IL-20 COOT, a Cold War-era reconnaissance aircraft operated by the Russian military, in the Alaskan identification zone yesterday after surveilling the same type of plane flying over the region Wednesday and Thursday. 
• In each instance, we responded by scrambling multiple fighter jets to monitor the spy plane. U.S. military officials have detected Russian warplanes inside the Alaskan identification zone on numerous occasions this year, including sightings within the bounds of the international space in April and July. 
• Sigh.
• Let’s talk about the weather.
• More than 30 million people are under extreme weather alerts as a sweltering heat wave lingers across the West. Excessive heat warnings and watches were effective in parts of California, Oregon, Washington, and the desert Southwest, with temperatures soaring well into triple-digit territory around Phoenix and approaching record highs near Seattle.
• I live at the beach and we pay a hefty weather tax here, but we’re not immune. There will come a time — probably in the second week of September, if history repeats itself — that I’ll be sitting here in my home with no air conditioning and it will be close to 100 degrees, if not higher.
• That will suck, and I will be complaining about it bitterly. Just a heads-up.
• Speaking of sucking, some news from the Business Desk…
• Keurig Dr Pepper is buying my beloved Peet’s Coffee in an $18 billion deal. The company is then splitting in two, with one company selling coffee and the other selling cold beverages like Snapple, Dr Pepper, 7UP, and energy drinks.
• BOOOOOOOOOOOO!
• This dubious deal arrives at a time when consumers are pulling back and the trade wars under Dump threaten to send coffee prices soaring.
• The Orange Tiny Penis Man imposed a 50% tariff this summer on most imports from Brazil — the world’s leading coffee producer — for its investigation of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is Dumpy’s little pal.
• So, hopefully they won’t fuck up Peet’s (he said, assuming they were definitely going to fuck up Peet’s).
• Let’s move on.
• Every once in awhile, I have people inquire as to where and how I get the info that goes into this little conglomeration of news items I post each morning.
• It’s extraordinarily simple. My top-tier resources are the trusted, non-partisan, and highly vetted news articles from the Associated Press and Reuters.
• Do I find info on various topics from other sources? Yes, a ton of them. NPR, BBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, The Hill, Politico, Al Jazeera, and more.
• But the reason I am so in tune with those media outlets is because I not only follow them on various social media — Threads is probably the best for this — and I also follow the journalists who research and report the news to those organizations.
• Therefore, I often have that info before the mass media has even covered it. And then, as you’re aware, I simply compile it for the following day.
• That being said, I don’t pre-write any of this news. I’ll make a note here or there as a reminder, but the world moves at too fast a pace for nearly anything to remain accurate in an evolving situation over the course of 24 (or more) hours.
• And now, The Weather: “Shining” by Mac Demarco
• From the Sports Desk… the crowd at T-Mobile Park is Seattle was chanting “MVP!" as Cal Raleigh stepped to the plate. They may be right.
• The Seattle Mariners slugger hit his major league-leading 48th and 49th home runs yesterday, setting a single-season record for catchers.
• Raleigh's record-breaking home run also marked his ninth multi-home run game of the season, passing Mickey Mantle (eight for the 1961 New York Yankees) for most multi-home run games by a switch-hitter in a season in major league history.
• The dude — with his nickname of “Big Dumper” — is special. Congrats to him.
• Today in history… Byzantine emperor Constantine V discovers a plot against him and executes the leaders (766). António Mota and a few of his friends become the first Europeans to visit Japan (1543). Gallileo demonstrates his first telescope (1609). A hoax is published in ‘The New York Sun’ about the discovery of life and civilization on the Moon (1835). Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel (1875). Germany purposefully destroys the library of the Catholic University, losing hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts in WWI (1914). The British Royal Air Force bombs Berlin in WWII for the first time (1940). Paris is liberated by the Allies during WWII (1944). American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell is shot and killed by a former member of his group (1967). ‘Voyager 2’ makes its closest approach to Saturn (1981). ’Voyager 2’ makes its closest approach to Neptune (1989). Belarus gains its independence from the Soviet Union (1991). Linus Torvalds announces the first version of Linux (1991). Aaliyah is killed in a plane crash in the Bahamas (2001). Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in Florida (2005). ’Voyager 1’ becomes the first man-made object to enter interstellar space (2012). Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2004 (2017).
• August 25 is the birthday of Russian ruler Ivan the Terrible (1530), painter George Stubbs (1724), Bavarian king Ludwig I (1786), writer/activist John Neal (1793), detective/spy Allan Pinkerton (1819), dentist Henry Trendly Dean (1893), actor Van Johnson (1916), actor Mel Ferrer (1917), athlete Althea Gibson (1927), actor Sean Connery (1930), TV host Regis Philbin (1931), saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter (1933), MLB player Rollie Fingers (1946), singer-songwriter/bass player Gene Simmons (1949), singer-songwriter Rob Halford (1951), keyboardist/composer Geoff Downes (1952), singer-songwriter Elvis Costello (1954), director Tim Burton (1958), singer-songwriter Billy Ray Cyrus (1961), guitarist/composer Vivian Campbell (1962), rapper Shock G (1963), singer-songwriter/murder victim Mia Zapata (1965), singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy (1967), NBA player Robert Horry (1970), model Claudia Schiffer (1970), actor Alexander Skarsgård (1976), actress Blake Lively (1987), and MLB player Max Muncy (1990).

That’s all I’ve got for now. Enjoy your day.