As always, there’s a major story in the news that’s drowning out coverage of everything else.  So, worthy though it is of notice, I’ll be leaving the George Floyd protests out of this and telling you about a few other things that you might have missed:

– SpaceX made its first crewed launch for NASA, successfully transferring two astronauts to the International Space Station in the first manned space launch from American soil for over a decade.

– Costa Rica has become the first Central American country to authorize same-sex marriage.    Incidentally, they also abolished their military in the late 1940s and is one of the few American nations not currently experiencing some sort of civil unrest.  Perhaps they know something we don’t.

– The Libyan Government of National Accord has captured the capitol city of Tripoli.  Their opponents, the Libyan National Army, completed their retreat earlier today.  The Libyan Civil War, as you may know, is now a proxy war between such powers as Egypt, Russia, and Turkey, presumably because they’re too far apart to wage normal wars  (Russia and Turkey have some pesky mountains between them).  The Libyans don’t appear to care, however, and seem likely to continue happily shooting one another for the foreseeable future.  Though perhaps not in Tripoli, so that’s something.

– Hong Kong banned its annual memorialization of the Tianamen Square protests for the first time in the 31 years since the event.  Instead, following social distancing guidelines, scattered observations have taken place across the territory.  Meanwhile, a controversial law forbidding mockery of the Chinese national anthem under threat of severe penalty has gone into effect.

– A massive fuel tank in a Russian power plant ruptured, spilling some 20,000 gallons of fuel oil into the Ambarnaya River in northern Siberia.  After the company attempted and failed at a coverup, the government stepped in.  If not controlled, this will be one of the worst spills in history.  Those responsible apparently are said to be fearing exile to Siberia as punishment, possibly equipped with rags and a bucket.

– The former president of Ecuador has been arrested on weapons charges during a corruption investigation.  The former First Lady of Lesotho has been charged with murder.  Meanwhile, there are sturdy new fences going up all around the White House and a cordon of officers from the Bureau of Prisons.

– Six new cases of ebola have been reported in the Congo, because that’s all we need.

– A 20-year-old Kurdish man was stabbed to death by three men in Ankara, Turkey, evidently for the crime of playing Kurdish music.  Nobody seems to care much.

– The Juukan Gorge cave complex in western Australia has been destroyed by mining interests in the area which were preparing to exploit the substantial iron ore reserves in the local mountains.  These caves represented the oldest known habitation of ancient mankind.  The mining firm has issued an apology and a lot of politicians are quite vocal, but nobody appears to have stopped them from mining iron.

– Sudan and Ethiopia may be headed for war, as Sudanese militias continue to raid across the Ethiopian border.  Meanwhile, a massive cattle raid was conducted in Nigeria by over a hundred heavily armed men on motorcycles, which led to the killing of at least eighteen civilians.

– The worst plague of locusts to hit India in thirty years continues, as do similar plagues in east Africa.

– To hell with Epstein.  Breonna Taylor is still dead, and ten weeks later nobody’s talking about ending the damn War On Drugs, the single largest contributor to police brutality and racial inequality in the United States and the sole cause of the Mexican Drug War, which has cost more lives than any other undeclared conflict known to man.  It has accomplished nothing more than raising the prison population of the so-called “Land of the Free” to levels higher than even the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Doubtless a few other things have happened, but my level of disgust has passed any reasonable threshold and my gorge has risen past containment.

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While I play “Columbia, Gem Of The Ocean” on repeat in an effort to regain my composure, I ask you to contemplate the contribution button below.  The Not Fake News has received no funds in over a month, and we’re about to shut down the staff coffee maker because the creamer has expired, begun developing a civilization, raised a flag, and declared its independence from the coffee cart.  It’s not that big an event in the great scheme of things, but here it’s pretty darn monumental.