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 ago, and when I first weighed myself at home 4 days ago,

   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 cost of covid?   Seems like an uncalculable task, but Jakub Hlávaka (top photo) and Adam Rose of CREATE ( University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergency ) made an attempt. First, th