March 28

By Gabby F

Baseball is one of America’s most beloved sports and has been growing each and every year. The 2024 Major League Baseball season recorded the largest game attendance since 2017 with a 73.1 million total, an increase of about 6.8 million, or +11%, from 2022.

The 2025 season welcomed its first two games as part of the MLB World Tour series featuring the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, Japan on March 18th, and 19th. The defending World Series champion Dodgers walked away with two wins with memorable moments including Shohei Ohtani’s solo home run. The Tokyo games broke records in viewership, merchandise sales, and game attendance, securing its place as the largest standalone international event in MLB history, as confirmed by MLB.com.

14 Opening Day games will be played on March 27th featuring 28 of the 30 MLB teams. The first game of the day being the Brewers-Yankees matchup at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York City. On the following day, March 28th, the Tampa Bay Rays and Colorado Rockies will play. Their game was moved to give more preparation time of George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida. Though typically the Spring Training facility of the Yankees, it will house the Rays for the 2025 season as their regular home of Tropicana Field faced great damage due to Hurricane Milton that ravaged the south last October. 

The question of who will open each game as each team's starting pitcher has remained a vital question during Spring Training. 11 teams will feature the same starting pitcher as their 2024 season including the Detroit Tigers with 2024 American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal. Skubal, as well as Philadelphia Phillies opening pitcher Zack Wheeler and Pittsburgh Pirates opener Paul Skenes are arguably the best starting pitchers this year. 

Leading up to the beginning of the season, MLB The Show ‘25, the baseball video game,  was released on March 18th. This year is the games 20th anniversary and features players Paul Skenes, Elly De La Cruz of the Cincinnati Reds, and Gunnar Henderson of the Baltimore Orioles on the cover. Typically there is just one athlete featured on the cover of the game, however this year for the anniversary the trio was selected to represent all of the young talent entering the league. The trio is expected to continue to do great things in the upcoming season, however Henderson, the Orioles star shortstop, was just announced to be missing opening day due to a ‘lingering oblique issue’. The Orioles will face the Toronto Blue Jays on Opening Day in Toronto, their home opener being on March 31st against the Boston Red Sox. It is unclear exactly how long Henderson will miss, however it is hopeful that he will just miss the beginning of the season. 

As the official beginning of the 2025 season nears closer and closer, fans everywhere get their jerseys, hotdogs, and foam fingers ready for another great year of Major League Baseball!

By Cheyenne Tyner

On March 18, 2025, declassified by President Donald Trump’s administration, the National Archives released tens of  thousands of pages of unredacted records related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The release of these files came out after Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at fully releasing official documents related to Kennedy’s assassination over 60 years ago. 

So far, nothing in the documents state that there was no second gunman. However, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decades of secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unpleasant practices of U.S. intelligence operations. 

The files are filled with details about the CIA’s agents, informants, covert actions, and budget lines. They produced few revelations but plenty of collateral damage. 

President Trump stated that he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to JFK’s assassination, however, only 64,000 of those documents were made public. 

The files contained not only new information about JFK’s assassination, but also Martin Luther King Jr.’s. 

Tom Samoluk was a deputy director of Assassination Records Review Board, a government panel established in the 1990’s to study records related to the assassination. After reviewing the files, he claimed that there isn’t anything to change the current conclusion of JFK’s assassination: that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible for his death. 

He told CNN in a phone interview, “The collection of records that we reviewed, the vast majority of which were released—some were kept classified in whole or in part—if that’s what we’re talking about, then there is no smoking gun.” 

The additional documents are withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and they must be unsealed before release. 

By Sophia B

Did you know that there was a new Looney Tunes movie out? Well, you’re not supposed to. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is entirely 2D animated and uses modern animation techniques to bring the feel of the original cartoons to the big screen. But it was never supposed to be seen in the first place.

The Day the Earth Blew Up was supposed to suffer the same fate of Coyote vs. Acme, another Looney Tunes movie. Coyote vs. Acme was a hybrid 3D-live action film, following the antics of Wile E. Coyote as he sues Acme for their products’ failure to help him catch the Roadrunner. The movie was completely done with post-production, and was received well at test screenings, but was infamously shelved as a tax-write off for Warner Bros. It’s not likely we will ever see the final product, but efforts have been raised to “Free Coyote vs. Acme.”    

     Writing off and deleting cartoons has been a recent trend for Warner Bros. Discovery under the leadership of David Zaslav, the current CEO of WB. Many Cartoon Network shows have been removed from WB’s streaming service, Max, and are looking for a new home after the shutdown of Cartoon Network Studios. Now, back on the subject of Looney Tunes. All of the original shorts were flat-out removed from Max, and are no longer available on the streaming service, along with Sesame Street episodes. This is the work of David Zaslav, who has stated in multiple interviews that he wants the company to pivot towards “adult” and “family” content, which is a downplay of animation as a “kids genre”. He completely ignores the timelessness of the Looney Tunes and even the high educational value of the live-action Sesame Street.

Just when it seemed like The Day the Earth Blew Up would never be seen by public eyes, Ketchup Entertainment, a financer-distribution company, swooped up the project and gained distribution rights. Even though the film has a limited release window, Ketchup was able to extend the screening window by another week, as leaked by the storyboard artist Michael Ruocco on the social media platform BlueSky. There are also rumors that Ketchup is in talks to buy Coyote vs. Acme from Warner Bros for upwards of 50 million dollars and distribute it as they did with The Day the Earth Blew Up.

      Why is Warner Bros. Discovery trying to erase the Looney Tunes franchise in the first place? The Day the Earth Blew Up, which, on a 15 million dollar budget, was given no marketing or chance to market by WB, and had to be sold to another company to even get it out in theaters. Along with the removal of the archived original Looney Tunes shorts on Max, this effort of deletion is on par with Disney trying to get rid of Mickey Mouse, or DreamWorks erasing Shrek. Why would Warner Bros. want to get rid of characters that not only served as a foundation for their media empire but also as a pioneer of Western cartoons and their style? Answer: it’s money. Simple as that. Zaslav understands what brings in the profit, that being reality TV. We all know CEOs in the entertainment industry aren’t in charge because they genuinely love the art, but Zaslav’s cuts and deletion are unprecedented in recent times, when “creativity is dead in Hollywood” and consumers and cinephiles alike are turning to foreign and indie projects. Now, when there’s an actual solid movie made in Hollywood, even with adapted and recognizable characters, the executives don’t give it a chance for a release and don’t see the art’s worth. Just because it is too much of a “risk”.

Although The Day the Earth Blew Up has not been doing well at the box office, you can still support the artists by just going to see the movie with your family and friends, and you can post on social media about it. I’m not saying everyone should be the third-party account on Twitter that was responsible for basically all the marketing of Transformers One last summer, but getting the word out about the trials and tribulations this film went through to just get released will incentivize people to do what the artists want: for the audience to enjoy and have a good laugh with the art they put to screen. So get out and go see it as soon as possible. Well, for now, that’s all, folks!