BANGKOK, Thailand -- More Americans have died from COVID-19 than were
killed during 16 years of the Vietnam War, a grim milestone coinciding
with Hanoi officially reporting zero deaths from the coronavirus.

"Fighting the epidemic is like fighting against the enemy," the
Communist Party of Vietnam declared.

As of April 29, at least 58,365 Americans have died from the virus,
according to Johns Hopkins University, CNN reported.

At least 58,220 Americans were killed in the region-wide Vietnam War,
starting with two American advisors in 1959 and ending in 1975 when
U.S. forces retreated in defeat.

For both nations' COVID-19 tolls to be proportionately equal,
America's 58,365 deaths among its 329 million population would be
matched if 17,166 died among Vietnam's 97 million citizens.

Vietnam recorded zero coronavirus deaths as of April 28, the
government's National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and
Control said. Another 270 cases proved positive.

Vietnam's real toll could be higher, but may still be among the

The Columbus Dispatch appears bound and determined to break the daily newspaper reading habit in central Ohio.

First, management keeps jacking up the price of home delivery and single copies of the print product.

Second, the newspaper keeps getting thinner and thinner as less news and information is provided compared to the past.

Third, the deadline for the next day's paper keeps getting earlier and earlier. It was around 9 or 10 o'clock at night for the early edition until the printing plant in Columbus was closed and moved to Indianapolis in January. Then the deadline was moved up to 7 p.m., ostensibly because it takes nearly three hours to truck the papers to Columbus.

I did some checking and found out that 7 p.m. was also the deadline for the Indianapolis Star, a sister newspaper of the Dispatch under the new merged company called Gannett.

What?

Why would the Star be stuck with such an early deadline when there is no 3-hour trucking imperative?

Naomi Klein’s No Logo exposed the insidious invasion of our psyches by the billions of dollars in carefully scripted ad messages – propaganda - designed to program our brains to accept the branding of products and services churned out by the multinational corporations that run the global consumer economy.  More recently, in the era of social media, Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism demonstrated how the ad industries now steal our privacy by scraping the details of our lifestyles from the apps on our cell phones to feed Big Data’s targeted marketing campaigns in their endless pursuit of profit. 

Note: With most movie theaters closed due to the pandemic, major Hollywood openings have been put on hold. One of the few silver linings of this is that it allows small and often worthy films—some of them directed by women—to debut without competing with the blockbusters. This is one of them.

Tough but touching, Bull is the story of a girl’s coming of age amid the direst of conditions. It’s also the story of her unlikely relationship with an aging rodeo performer, as well as a window into a subculture most of us know nothing about. 

Kris (Amber Havard) is a 14-year-old living on the outskirts of Houston with her grandmother and younger sister while she waits for her mother to serve out a prison term. Mostly left on her own, she has a tendency to get into the kind of trouble that suggests she’ll eventually follow in her mom’s self-destructive footsteps.