By now, you must be supersaturated on travel.  Today, I return to my usual reportage, special focus depending on the day of the week, and a wide range of topics, with in-depth looks at energy, the environment, space, humanity, politics and such.   The world hotspot these days is the Middle East. 63-year old Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and seven others, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were killed in a helicopter crash.   There was fog and the weather was bad. The knee-jerk reaction of somehow blaming Israel did not occur. Instead, former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the United states was one of the main culprits. Why?  The U.S. has placed sanctions on helicopter parts.. Most of the operating helicopters date back before the 1979 Islamic Revolution 45 years ago. The helicopter that crashed was a Bell 212, one of their newer ones, purchased in the early 2000s.  There are 15 of them of average age 35 years in Iran. Ra...

  First, can't help but start the week with another Lukovich cartoon: Also, too,  David Brooks of the  New York Times  this week had an op-ed about Donald Trump. The world is saved in tiny steps over time, and  Anthony Blinken did personally meet with President Xi Jinping . Then, of course, today is Juneteenth, celebrated as a public holiday by more than half of our states, but not Hawaii.  We have too many days off as it is, and June 19 is too close to June 11, King Kamehameha the First Day.  While there is no slavery today in the country, Blacks do earn far less than Whites.  From the  New York Times  this morning. And for Republicans who are worried about how hourly wages are increasing too rapidly, the reality is that, accounting for inflation, minimum wages are actually lower than in 1978.  For those who can't subtract, that was 45 years ago.  Also from  TNYT . I'm doing fine, too.  Returned from Las Vegas 9 days...

   Some weekly   Worldometer   info on COVID-19: Deaths over the past 7 days. World  1913 #1    Brazil  243 #2    Germany 223 #3    USA  209 #4    Russia  183 #5    France  155 Deaths in the past 7 days per million population. World  0.24 #1    New Zealand  11 #2    Hong Kong  11 #3    Martinique  5 #4    Greece  4 #5    Denmark  4 #11  S. Korea  2 #17  Brazil  1 #23  USA  0.9 Worried about long covid?  At one time as high as one-third of people who got infected were suspected of suffering this symptomatic fallout.  However, a  recent study seems to show that only 10% now suffer from this ailment .  Part of the reason is that the subvariants from Omicron to the present are not as troublesome.  Now that the pandemic has been declared over,  what was the cos...