Random News and Notes 5 October

On this date:

• 1762 – The British fleet bombards and captures Spanish-held Manila in the Philippines.
• 1795 – The day after he routed counterrevolutionaries in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte accepts their formal surrender.
• 1813 – U.S. victory at the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, broke Britain’s Indian allies with the death of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, and made the Detroit frontier safe.
• 1821 – Greek rebels capture Tripolitza, the main Turkish fort in the Peloponnese area of Greece.
• 1877 – Nez Perce Chief Joseph surrenders to Colonel Nelson Miles in Montana Territory, after a 1,700-mile trek to reach Canada falls 40 miles short.
• 1880 – The first ball-point pen is patented on this day by Alonzo T. Cross.
• 1882 – Outlaw Frank James surrenders in Missouri six months after brother Jesse’s assassination.
• 1915 – Bulgaria enters World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
• 1915 – Germany issues an apology and promises for payment for the 128 American passengers killed in the sinking of the British ship Lusitania.
• 1921 – The World Series is broadcast on radio for the first time.
• 1931 – Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon complete the first heavier than air nonstop flight over the Pacific. Their flight, begun October 3, lasted 41 hours, 31 minutes and covered 5,000 miles. They piloted their Bellanca CH-200 monoplane from Samushiro, 300 miles north of Tokyo, Japan, to Wenatchee, Washington.
• 1938 – Germany invalidates Jews’ passports.
• 1943 – Imperial Japanese forces execute 98 American POWs on Wake Island.
• 1947 – US President Harry S Truman delivers the first televised White House address.
• 1948 – A magnitude 7.3 earthquake near Ashgabat (now the Capitol of Turkmenistan) in the USSR kills tens of thousands; estimates range from 110,000 to 176,000. The city was rebuilt with monumental white Italian marble structures and holds the Guinness World Record for the highest concentration of white marble buildings
• 1962 – The first James Bond film, Dr. No starring Sean Connery, debuts.
• 1966 – A sodium cooling system malfunction causes a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration breeder reactor near Detroit. Radiation is contained.
• 1968 – Police attack civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland; the event is considered to be the beginning of “The Troubles.”
• 1969 – Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts on BBC One. And now for something completely different.
• 1970 – The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is established.
• 1970 – Members of the Quebec Liberation Front kidnap British Trade Commissioner James Cross in Montreal, resulting in the October Crisis and Canada’s first peacetime use of the War Measures Act.
• 2000 – Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, resigns in the wake of mass protest demonstrations.

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has died. Hastert, an Illinois Republican, was the Speaker from 1999 – following Newt Gingrich – to 2007. He faced criminal charges for structuring hush money payments to sex abuse victims from his time as a wrestling coach.

Hastert was 84.

The FBI bagged a CCP spy yesterday as she attempted to flee the country. Authorities arrested Wanying Zhang at Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday as she tried to board a flight to China. The FBI complaint details how she traveled to Seattle in September 2025, at the direction of Chinese officials, to surveil Ting-Yu Lai—the son of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te—along with his wife and young child. She photographed their home and vehicles, collected license plate numbers, and sent the information via WeChat, all without registering as a foreign agent.

Director Kash Patel emphasized that America is cracking down on such espionage, while Taiwan’s presidential office thanked U.S. authorities for countering what they called transnational repression. Zhang will be arraigned later today.

The rest of today’s news is going to be international heavy. Lots going on around the world. Starting in Spain, the retard commie PM there, Pedro Sanchez, has called snap elections after his government fell. His minority ruling coalition fell after Parliament rejected a pair of emergency housing measures.

Sanchez is unlikely to win this election. Right now it appears that his government will likely be replaced by a coalition government of Vox and PP – both right/center right parties.

In an update on a story from Saturday, Russian officials have expanded the quarantine in Irkutsk Oblast. As I told you Saturday, there was a lab accident in a BSL3 lab involving pneumonic plague – one of two types of infection from Yersina Pestis. A lab technician broke a vial containing the vector and died within 5 days of being exposed. The quarantine now covers 5 regional medical facilities.

This has the potential to be very bad. Of the two y. pestis infections, pneumonic is the one that can be spread person to person. Bubonic – the other variant – is transmitted via flea bite. Kazakhstan has tightened border controls due to the outbreak.

I really hope this just kinda goes away. New scholarship seems to point to pneumonic plague being the driver of mortality during the Black Death rather than bubonic.

A British Air 777 had to make an emergency return to Heathrow this morning. Flight BA295 departed London Heathrow around 11:50 a.m. local time, reached cruising altitude, then executed a steep 28,000-foot drop while squawking the 7700 emergency code. The plane turned back toward London and is burning off fuel in preparation for landing.

Early speculation is the aircraft suffered some sort of decompression incident. This is a breaking story and will be updated when more info becomes available.