For some reason, this posting was not published on January 19.  Made an adjustment, so perhaps this will occur today. Well, that  Gaza Strip ceasefire deal began  at 8:30AM local time, and three hours later the Hamas delivered the first three hostages. They were in captivity for 471 days. By now Israel should have released 90 Palestinian prisoners. TikTok went dark Saturday night.   However this afternoon, TikTok announced that it would begin restoring service to U.S. users.  They thanked President-elect Trump for his save.   There are three with more than a hundred million followers . #1 is Khabane  Lame (right), an influencer from Italy and Senegal.  He has 162.4 million following him. Khaby Lame is incredibly popular on TikTok because he creates silent, comedic reaction videos that mock overly complicated "life hacks" by showing simple, obvious solutions with exaggerated facial expressions, making his content universally relatable and...

Three days from now, January 20, will be a busy day: Donald Trump's inauguration  has been moved indoors , the Capitol rotunda, with viewers being sent to the Capital One Arena.  The last time this happened was in 1985 for Ronald Reagan, when the temperature reached 7F.  Not so bad this year at up to 19F, but the prominent factor was wind chill.  It is very uncomfortable in DC at this time of year. It was on  13January1982  when I was working for the U.S. Senate. This was a particularly cold period for the city, with temperatures dropping to below zero.  Chicago that day was -25F.  Citrus groves in Florida froze. It began snowing, all told, around 6 inches in a few hours.  A fire in the Metro train line made for a particularly traffic nightmare. When the snowfall seemed to be ending, the first plane to take off at National Airport ( later named Reagan International--he first got elected in 1981 ) when visibility was only a sixteenth of a mile...

Last week I indicated that all signs showed that the Japanese Yen to U.S. Dollar exchange rate would probably continue to favor the USA.  That is, for travelers to Japan to get more value for the $.  Well, it's beginning to happen, as the Yen dropped to its lowest level since 1986 against our dollar today, and  traded at 160.39 . About the topic of the day, I am a Japanese American, and rice has been my staple now for more than 80 years.  My family has cooked a large batch of rice so that the leftover can be stored, something that is not recommended today.  In those days, there were no rice cookers.  I always ate leftover rice left in the refrigerator, and still do.  I don't recall one incident of food poisoning, both myself and anyone I know.  Incidentally, keeping the rice for long periods in a cooker in the warm setting is not recommended. So while the  Cleveland Clinic  reports that there are 63,4000 annual cases of food poisoning, a...