Random News and Notes 6 September

On this date:

• 394 – Theodosius becomes sole ruler of Italy after defeating Eugenius at the Battle of the River Frigidus.
• 1422 – Sultan Murat II ends a vain siege of Constantinople.
• 1522 – The Victoria, one of the five ships that set out in Ferdinand Magellan’s trip around the world, makes it back to Spain. Only 15 of the original 265 men that set out survived. Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines.
• 1688 – Imperial (Hapsburg) troops defeat the Turks and take Belgrade, Serbia.
• 1781 – British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, a former Patriot officer already infamous and much maligned for betraying the United States the previous year, adds to his notoriety by ordering his British command to burn New London, Connecticut.
• 1793 – French General Jean Houchard and his 40,000 men begin a three-day battle against an Anglo-Hanoverian army at Hondschoote, southwest Belgium, in the wars of the French Revolution.
• 1847 – Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves back into town, to Concord, Massachusetts.
• 1861 – Union General Ulysses S. Grant‘s forces capture Paducah, Kentucky from Confederate forces.
• 1870 – The last British troops to serve in Austria are withdrawn.
• 1901 – President William McKinley is shot while attending a reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, by 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley dies eight days later, the third American president assassinated.

• 1918 – The German Army begins a general retreat across the Aisne, with British troops in pursuit.
• 1936 – Aviator Beryl Markham flies the first east-to-west solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
• 1937 – The Soviet Union accuses Italy of torpedoing two Russian ships in the Mediterranean.
• 1941 – Germany announces that all Jews living in the country will have to begin wearing a Star of David.
• 1943 – The United States asks the Chinese Nationals to join with the Communists to present a common front to the Japanese.
• 1953 – The last American and Korean prisoners are exchanged in Operation Big Switch, the last official act of the Korean War.
• 1965 – Indian troops invade Lahore; Pakistan paratroopers raid Punjab.
• 1976 – Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, a Soviet pilot, lands his MIG-25 in Tokyo and asks for political asylum in the United States.
• 1991 – USSR officially recognizes independence for the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
• 1991 – Leningrad, second-largest city in the USSR, is changed to Saint Petersburg, which had been the city’s name prior to 1924.
• 1995 – Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken Jr. plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking a 56-year MLB record held by Lou Gehrig.
• 1997 – Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales: over 1 million people line London’s streets to honor her and 2.5 billion watched the event on TV.

We start today’s news at the MVAP weather desk. The Atlantic hurricane season has been a dud thus far, only 5 named tropical storms have spun up, and not one lasted long or reached hurricane intensity. If that pattern continues until 12 September, it will be a record for the modern (1960) era.

Meanwhile, there have been multiple major hurricanes in the Pacific, including a rare triplet as recent as Friday. Lowell, Karina (now downgraded to a tropical storm) and Marie took advantage of the current El Nino – warmer than normal – conditions in the Pacific. The current surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are the highest on record – again dating back to 1960 when the first weather satellites were launched.

The weather guy consensus is that the El Nino will bring major effects across North America this winter. During a strong El Nino, warmer tropical Pacific waters strengthen and shift the Pacific jet stream southward, typically bringing wetter-than-average winters with heavier rainfall and higher flood risk across the southern United States (especially California, the Southwest, and Gulf Coast). In contrast, the northern United States and much of Canada often experience milder temperatures, reduced snowfall, and drier conditions. So either YAY for you – if like me you are in the northern part of the continent – or watch the skies.

This one amuses me on more than one level. There is some histrionic screeching about the effect of the new H-1B visa rules and the Texas real estate market. A new report seems to indicate that H-1Bs are abandoning their mortgages and f*cking off home to India and Pakistan.

How many H-1Bs? 10. Yeah people are losing their shit because 10 streetshitting Pajeet families have upped stakes and went home, abandoning their homes and mortgages along the way.

Could this grow? Yes, it probably will, but the doom and gloom about it’s going to be worse than 2008 is retarded.

The FBI and DOJ announced they captured an indicted fraudster who ran a Tacoma grocery store and allegedly trafficked SNAP benefits by swapping EBT cards for cash from March 2024 to June 2025, costing taxpayers at least $600,000. Manjit Singh Bedi, a naturalized US citizen, crossed into Canada before fleeing to Punjab after the indictment was handed down.

Pajeet err, Bedi is the 5th capture on the FBI’s list of most wanted fraudsters, part of a task force effort that has nabbed suspects linked to nearly $2 billion in fraud across continents.