Random News and Notes 23 September

On this date:

• 1553 – The Saadians defeat the last of their enemies and establish themselves as rulers of Morocco.
• 1561 – Philip II of Spain gives orders to halt colonizing efforts in Florida.
• 1577 – William of Orange makes his triumphant entry into Brussels, Belgium.
• 1667 – Slaves in Virginia are banned from obtaining their freedom by converting to Christianity.
• 1739 – The Austrians sign the Treaty of Belgrade after having lost the city to the Turks.
• 1779 – The American navy under John Paul Jones, commanding from Bonhomme Richard, defeats and captures the British man-of-war Serapis.
• 1788 – Louis XVI of France declares the Parliament restored.
• 1795 – A national plebiscite approves the new French constitution, but so many voters sustain that the results are suspect.
• 1803 – British Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley defeats the Marathas at Assaye, India.
• 1805 – Lieutenant Zebulon Pike pays $2,000 to buy from the Sioux a 9-square-mile tract at the mouth of the Minnesota River that will be used to establish a military post, Fort Snelling.
• 1806 – The Lewis and Clark Expedition arrives back in St. Louis just over three years after its departure.
• 1846 – German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovers the planet Neptune at the Berlin Observatory.
• 1864 – Confederate and Union forces clash at Mount Jackson, Front Royal and Woodstock in Virginia during the Valley campaign.
• 1875 – Billy the Kid is arrested for the first time after stealing a basket of laundry. He later broke out of jail and roamed the American West, eventually earning a reputation as an outlaw and murderer and a rap sheet that allegedly included 21 murders.
• 1912 – Mack Sennett’s first “Keystone Cop” film debuts, Cohen Collects a Debt.
• 1933 – A party of American geologists lands at the Persian Gulf port of Jubail in Saudi Arabia and begins its journey into the desert. That July, with the discovery of a massive oil field at Ghawar, Saudi King Abdel Aziz had granted the Standard Oil Company of California a concession to “explore and search for and drill and extract and manufacture and transport” petroleum and “kindred bituminous matter” in the country’s vast Eastern Province.
• 1945 – The first American dies in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon to French forces.
• 1954 – East German police arrest 400 citizens as U.S. spies.
• 1973 – Juan Peron is re-elected president of Argentina after being overthrown in 1955.
• 1983 – Gulf Air Flight 771 from Karachi, Pakistan, to Abu Dhabi, UAE, bombed; all 117 aboard die.
• 1992 – Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonates 3,700-lb. bomb in Belfast, completely destroying the Northern Ireland forensic laboratory, injuring 20 people and damaging 700 houses.

We start today’s News in the Republic of Korea. ROK based industrial giant Samsung pushed a faulty firmware update that hit Samsung’s Bespoke AI 4-Door refrigerators in South Korea, causing them to stop cooling and freeze on an ‘updating’ screen. The error pushed test software to customer units during internal testing, affecting dozens of 2024 models. The bad update occurred just days before Chuseok, a major Korean mid-autumn harvest festival similar to Thanksgiving, leaving affected owners without refrigeration on a major holiday weekend.

Call me a Luddite*, but I want my home appliances just smart enough to do their intended job. I do not want a refrigerator, oven, washer or dryer internet enabled for any reason.

*Luddites were originally 19th-century English textile workers who destroyed automated looms to protest threats to jobs, wages, and working conditions. The group took their name from Ned Ludd, a legendary or mythical apprentice said to have broken a knitting frame years earlier. The term has expanded to mean anyone anti-technology.

It seems the Haitians that lost status are trying to get to Canada. The Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on July 27, 2026, following a Supreme Court ruling, impacting 330,000 to 350,000 people who could no longer live and work legally in the U.S. Many are now crossing into Canada at official ports if they have family there or trying remote forest routes to bypass the Safe Third Country Agreement, which typically blocks asylum claims from those passing through the U.S. first.

The President took a shot at Canada over it. Warning “Canada is destroying itself by allowing millions and millions of people into the Country, essentially unchecked and unvetted, and who are causing problems that will soon be too big to handle. Already showing up in their numbers. Big unemployment. ‘Oh Canada!”

This one amuses me and makes me sad at the same time. A Philly area teacher and pro-pali activist has been claiming she was part Pali. Well, she is not. Hannah Gann, a veteran Philadelphia School District educator active in pro-Palestinian groups, publicly apologized on Instagram for years of lying about her identity. She had presented herself as Palestinian-American or mixed Black and Palestinian but revealed her true background as a white Jewish woman with family ties to Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

The internet has dubbed her the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal. Activist organizations like Philly Educators for Palestine called it a betrayal and have cut ties.

A KC woman – I hesitate to call her a mother – was sentenced to 13 years in prison for putting her infant daughter in a hot oven. Mariah K. Thomas, 28, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Jackson County Circuit Court to first-degree endangering the welfare of a child resulting in death after her daughter Za’Riah was found unresponsive with severe burns in their Forest Avenue home on Feb. 9, 2024. Prosecutors dropped initial first-degree murder charges in the deal, leading Judge Sarah A. Castle to impose a 13-year prison term.

I am going to refrain from comment. Everything I am currently thinking, well you know.