Odds and ends

The following are short quips of newsworthy stories picked up from the national media over the past week that some of you will find interesting. Sources are quoted when they are known.

Former Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, along with ex-New York Yankee star Derek Jeter won a bidding auction to buy the Florida Marlins baseball team for a reported 1.3 billion dollars. Bush is expected to be the principle owner.

A British survey found that 1 in 5 people admit they don’t know how to change a light bulb or boil and egg. Researchers called it a ‘skills gap’.

I’m sure most of you have heard about high-end retailer Nordstrom selling $425 jeans that come caked with fake mud. Nordstrom says the pre-distressed ‘American workwear’ will serve as proof that wearers are ‘not afraid to get down and dirty’.

A group of Columbia University students draped a Ku Klux Klan hood over a statue of Thomas Jefferson and labeled the Founding Father ‘the epitome of white supremacy.’

Protesters from the group Mobilized African Diaspora said the statue of the slave-holding Founding Father ‘validates rape, sexual violence and racism’ and shows Columbia’s ‘hypocrisy’ in recruiting black students as ‘mere tokens of the university.’

Recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s first recorded vote was a tiebreaker that allowed Arkansas to execute its first death row inmate in 12 years, in a 5-4 vote. (Slate.com)

Opioid makers and suppliers have spent $880 million in the past decade lobbying state and federal legislators to block new regulations on their addictive painkillers and make the drugs more easily available. That’s eight times as much as gun makers spent on lobbying during that time. (Vox.com)

President Trump raised a record-breaking $107 million for his inaugural festivities, about double the record set by President Barack Obama in 2009. Las Vegas gaming billionaire Sheldon Adelson donated $6 million, while five NFL owners chipped in $1 million each. Pfizer, Dow Chemical and the Bank of American also gave $1 million each (Associated Press)

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. spiked following the November election and the pace of such incidents has accelerated over the past five months, according to the Anti-Defamation League. There has been an 86 percent increase in incidents of vandalism and bullying since January 1 and a total of 541 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the first quester of 2017, including 161 bomb threats, 155 acts of vandalism and six assaults.

Only 42 percent of Americans approve of President Trump’s performance as president while 53 percent disapprove, the lowest approval rating for any president at the 100-day mark in seven decades. The average approval to disapproval rating for previous presidents at this state is 69 percent to 19 percent. On the other hand, 96 percent of people who say they voted for Trump in November would do so again. (Washington Post/ABC News)

31 percent of credit card holders say they’ve never redeemed any of the rewards they’ve earned, like cash back or discounts on airline tickets. Credit card companies, which depend on customers not taking full advantage of the perks offered, typically plan for about 20 percent of rewards to go unused. (BusinessInsider.com)

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will receive a golden parachute of around $186 million once the sale of the struggling internet company is completed in June. That figure does not include the millions of dollars in salary and bonuses she received over the past five years as CEO (CNN.com)

Finally, the House of Representatives passed a Health Care Bill of their own this past week by one vote. There were 217 yes votes and 216 were needed for passage. No Democrat voted for the bill and 20 Republicans voted against it. It will face major challenges in the Senate with several amendments likely to be added and passage does not look promising. President Trump is the first President since Jimmy Carter to not have a bill signed into law during his first 100 days, even though the Republican Party is in charge of both houses of Congress.