Random News and Notes 24 August

On this date:

• 79 – Mount Vesuvius erupts destroying Pompeii, Stabiae, Herculaneum and other smaller settlements.
• 410 -Visigoths led by King Alaric sack Rome.
• 1542 – In South America, Gonzalo Pizarro returns to the mouth of the Amazon River after having sailed the length of the great river as far as the Andes Mountains.
• 1572 – Some 50,000 people are put to death in the ‘Massacre of St. Bartholomew’ as Charles IX of France attempts to rid the country of Huguenots.
• 1780 – King Louis XVI abolishes torture as a means to get suspects to confess.
• 1814 – British troops under General Robert Ross capture Washington, D.C., which they set on fire in retaliation for the American burning of the parliament building in York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada.
• 1869 – Cornelius Swarthout of Troy, New York, patents the waffle iron.
• 1891 – Thomas Edison files a patent for the motion picture camera.
• 1894 – Congress passes the first graduated income tax law, which is declared unconstitutional the next year.
• 1912 – By an act of Congress, Alaska is given a territorial legislature of two houses.
• 1942 – In the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the third carrier-versus-carrier battle of the war, U.S. naval forces defeat a Japanese force attempting to screen reinforcements for the Guadalcanal fighting.

• 1954 – Congress outlaws the Communist Party in the United States.
• 1963 – US State Department cables embassy in Saigon that if South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem does not remove his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as his political adviser the US would explore alternative leadership, setting the stage for a coup by ARVN generals.
• 1969 – Company A 3/196th Light Infantry Brigade refuses the order of its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack that had been launched to reach a downed helicopter shot down in the Que Son valley.
• 1975 – The principal leaders of Greece’s 1967 coup—Georgios Papadopoulos, Stylianos Pattakos, and Nikolaos Maarezos—sentenced to death for high treason, later commuted to life in prison.
• 1981 – Mark David Chapman sentenced to 20 years to life for murdering former Beatles band member John Lennon.
• 1989 – Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti bans Pete Rose from baseball for gambling.
• 1989 – Colombian drug lords declare “total and absolute war” on Colombia’s government, bombing the offices of two political parties and burning two politicians’ homes.
• 1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Ukraine declares its independence from USSR.
• 1992 – Hurricane Andrew makes landfall in Florida. The Category 5 storm, which had already caused extensive damage in the Bahamas, caused $26.5 billion in US damages, caused 65 deaths, and felled 70,000 acres of trees in the Everglades.
• 2006 – Pluto is downgraded to a dwarf planet when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines “planet.”

We start the day’s news in Gary Indiana where up to 90,000 homes are without power for nearly two weeks. A derecho packing 99 mph winds, flooding, and tornadoes killed seven across Indiana and caused Gary’s worst damage. NIPSCO – the local electric utility – reporting the most extensive outages in its territory. Online commenters are trying to blame the length of the outage on racism. Unfortunately for them, the entire city council is black and the leadership team of NIPSCO is black. Moreover, repair efforts paused after gunfire hit a utility vehicle on August 14-15, but crews resumed with National Guard help and extra security.

The post above quoted another account, That person went private after the backlash so here is a screenshot of the original, community note included.

You may have seen some fear mongering about Buffalo-Niagara International airport running out of fuel. The retarded panic-filled posters saw a NOTAM (Notice to airmen) that fuel was not available for a short period of time yesterday and decided the entire airport was out of fuel.

The airport was not out of fuel. There was a major malfunction on the refuelling system for the apron area of the airport that limited the availability of fuel but the airport never ran short on supply and stayed open for flights. Crews made emergency repairs, restoring normal operations by midday with only minor delays for some flights. Officials from the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority confirmed the problem was not tied to any shortages.

This one warms me to the bottom of my cold, dead heart. A Cuban national who was in the US illegally and was deported to Central African Republic ran to CBS news to whinge about it. Yasmany Moreno de Armas, a 31-year-old Cuban, arrested by ICE in May 2025, spent nearly a year in custody before a late-July deportation flight landed him and dozens of others from countries like Ecuador, Honduras, Nepal, Russia, and Vietnam in the conflict-torn, landlocked nation. He describes being held without documents in a place the U.S. State Department warns against visiting due to violence and crime.

You should have left on your own. Then you could have chosen where you went.

Speaking of deportations, President Trump has confirmed that ICE has an ongoing investigation into Ilhan Omar. IN a Truth post, he said ICE denied a Freedom of Information Act request for documents on its probe into claims that Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, described by some as her brother, to help him gain U.S. residency in 2009. The agency cited a legal exemption to protect ongoing enforcement proceedings under Title 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A).

Omar, who entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1995, has denied the allegations as absurd and offensive, with no DNA evidence or court ruling confirming them.

I missed the initial story on this one. There was a fatal tractor-trailer crash in Mississippi this past Thursday. That crash killed 36-year-old Dedric Garrett of Terry in Hinds County. The driver? Well, they tried to keep the name quiet and you already know why. It came out late yesterday that the truck driver was Sube Singh, a 26-year-old from India living illegally in California.

Border Patrol first encountered Singh in 2017, released him on bond in 2018, and enrolled him in a GPS monitoring program. How he got a drivers licence nevermind a CDL is beyond me. He should join Senor de Armas in CAR.

A quick Iran note. The Iranian rial has just hit an all time low against the dollar. The Iranian currency is now trading at 2 million to the dollar. You read that right, it takes 2 million rial to buy a single US dollar. In 1979 they were trading at 70 to the dollar.

It is going to get worse for Iran with a new round of sanctions to go along with the Arabian Sea blockade. The Trump administration is intensifying sanctions on Iran, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling it an ‘economic D-Day’ to sever Tehran’s financial lifelines and force negotiations. Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has surged amid threats from Iranian officials to halt oil exports.