Random News and Notes 3 October

On this date:

• 1739 – Russia signs a treaty with the Turks, ending a three-year conflict between the two countries.
• 1776 – Congress borrows five million dollars to halt the rapid depreciation of paper money in the colonies.
• 1849 – Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious and wearing another man’s clothes outside of a Baltimore tavern being used as a polling place. Poe died in a Baltimore hospital four days later, yet the exact cause of his death and the sequence of events that led to it remain a mystery.  
• 1862 – At the Battle of Corinth, in Mississippi, a Union army defeats the Confederates.

• 1873 – Captain Jack (Kintpuash) and three other Modoc Indians are hanged in Oregon for the murder of General Edward Canby.
• 1876 – John L. Routt, the Colorado Territory governor, is elected the first state governor of Colorado in the Centennial year of the U.S.
• 1906 – The first conference on wireless telegraphy in Berlin adopts SOS as warning signal.
• 1917 – Six months after the United States declared war on Germany and began its participation in the First World War, the U.S. Congress passes the War Revenue Act, increasing income taxes to unprecedented levels in order to raise more money for the war effort.
• 1929 – The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes officially changes its name to Yugoslavia.
• 1931 – The comic strip Dick Tracy first appears in the New York News.
• 1932 – Britain terminates its mandate over the Arab nation, making Iraq independent after 12 years of British rule and centuries of Ottoman rule.
• 1940 – U.S. Army adopts airborne, or parachute, soldiers. Airborne troops were later used in World War II for landing troops in combat and infiltrating agents into enemy territory.
• 1941 – The Maltese Falson, starring Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade, opens.
• 1942 – Germany conducts the first successful test flight of a V-2 missile, which flies perfectly over a 118-mile course.
• 1944 – German troops evacuate Athens, Greece.
• 1951 – A “shot is heard around the world” when New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson hits a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, beating the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the National League pennant.
• 1952 – The UK successfully conducts a nuclear weapon, becoming the world’s third nuclear power
• 1955 – Two children’s television programs and a family sitcom all destined to become classics debut: Captain Kangaroo, Mickey Mouse Club, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
• 1963 – A violent coup in Honduras ends a period of political reform and ushers in two decades of military rule.
• 1981 – A hunger strike by Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison in Belfast in Northern Ireland is called off after seven months and 10 deaths. The first to die was Bobby Sands, the imprisoned Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader who initiated the protest on March 1, 1981–the fifth anniversary of the British policy of “criminalization” of Irish political prisoners.
• 1985 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis makes its maiden flight.
• 1990 – After 40 years of division, East and West Germany are reunited as one nation.
• 1993 – Battle of Mogadishu, in which 18 US soldiers and some 1,000 Somalis are killed during an attempt to capture officials of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s organization.

• 1995 – Former pro football star and actor O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, ending what many called “the Trial of the Century.”.
• 1997 – 69-year-old Hall of Famer Gordie Howe skates the first shift with the Detroit Vipers in their International Hockey League opener, becoming the only professional in hockey to compete in six decades.

The USCG is searching for an air ambulance carrying 6 souls that disappeared from radar over the Atlantic this morning. The Canadian-registered Gulfstream 100, operating as HEART BEAT 104 for Latitude Air Ambulance, fell off radar around 2 a.m. Saturday after a rapid descent from 24,000 feet near Nantucket, Massachusetts. Coast Guard teams deployed helicopters, aircraft, a cutter, and a lifeboat to scour waters 13 nautical miles south of the island, with the crew having declared an emergency moments earlier.

The twin-engine jet was en route to Boston Logan from Bermuda’s L.F. Wade International, with no details yet on passengers or issues reported.

This is a breaking story and will be updated as more detail becomes available.

There has been a leak at a lab that studies the plague (yersina pestis) in Siberia. A technician at the BSL3 lab in Irkutsk Oblast Russia has died of the pneumonic version of the infection. Daria Shipilova, a 27- or 28-year-old technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, broke a vial of plague bacteria around September 25 while handling samples. She developed severe pneumonia, was hospitalized on September 29 in Shelekhov, and passed away two days later from the pneumonic form of plague. Officials quarantined the hospital and placed nearly 200 contacts under observation. This is not voluntary quarantine, the FSB (one of the KGB’s successor agencies) is running the show.

There are two types of Y. pestis infection. The bubonic plague and the pneumonic plague. Both can be cured if treated with antibiotics, but they are both fatal if untreated. The pneumonic version is human to human transmissible via respiratory droplets.

The Iranian rial fell more than 14% in value in just the last week. The current exchange rate is 2,700,500 rial to the dollar. The rate in 1978 – prior to the Ayatollahs – was 70 to the dollar.

Year over year inflation in Iran is north of 90%.

Dunno about this one, 3D printed meat is hitting store shelves. Steakholder Foods launched its Perfecta brand of plant-based 3D printed products, like chicken breast and seafood patties, in select U.S. stores through distributor KeHE in early September 2026. These items use soy and plant proteins to mimic fibrous textures and marbling,

I don’t have any real issue with this as long as that fake shite is labeled as such.