Panther Stalks Box Office: Released over the weekend, the movie Black Panther based on the first black comic book superhero grossed $218 million in the US and $387 million worldwide, making it the fifth biggest movie opening ever.

Black Panther  was anticipated as much for its story about an African superhero as it was for the people who made it. The film has a black American director and a cast of stars including Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker, as well as a soundtrack co-produced by rap star Kendrick Lamar. Possibly no other movie has ever had so much black talent in front of and behind the camera, making it a big draw.

Also key to the popularity of the movie is its story about a fictional wealthy country called Wakanda that has never been colonized. “Wakanda is a kind of black utopia in our fight against colonialism and imperial control of black land and black people by white people,” Deirdre Hollman, a founder of the annual Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, told The NY Times. “There’s so much power that’s drawn from the notion that there was a community, a nation that resisted colonization and infiltration and subjugation.”

CNN’s Van Jones wrote, “This film is a godsend that will lift the self-esteem of black children in the US and around the world for a long time.”

The Russia Thing: Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates is preparing to plead guilty to financial fraud and testify against his business partner, Paul Manafort, who was briefly manager of the Trump campaign, The LA Times reports.

The indictment against Gates and Manafort revealed that prosecutors had documentation to prove that Manafort and Gates, both of whom went for years without registering as agents for the Ukraine government, hid millions of dollars of Ukraine payments from the US government.

Where this leads, you’ll just have to wait and see. It might dead end with a prosecution of Manafort, or Manafort might turn and give damaging information about the Trump campaign.

Tweeter in Chief: President Trump spent time during his weekend in Florida angrily tweeting complaints about the FBI, the Russia investigation, and the Parkland, Fla. School shooting. Saturday he said, “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – there is no collusion.”

Even the biggest disasters are about his personal worries.

Then yesterday: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said ‘it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’ The Russian ‘hoax’ was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!”

And then this: “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”

Columnist Thomas Friedman writes in The NY Times, “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.”

Mental Health: As pro-gun politicians put the focus on mental health rather than guns, The Washington Post has a story about how teachers and administrators for years tried to help the troubled school shooter, Nikolas Cruz. They told the Post that back in middle school Cruz displayed frightening and potentially dangerous behavior. The paper reports that Cruz was referred to individual and family counseling, parent conferences, and social workers. For a time, they sent him to a school for emotionally disturbed youth. Eventually he was kicked out of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School where the shooting took place.

The paper reports, “Instead of slipping through the cracks, it appears Cruz was the target of aggressive work to help put him on the right track. But it also appears he might have hit the limit of what could be done.”

The Big Buyback: Economist Robert Reich writes for The American Prospect that most of the tax-cut money the Republicans promised corporations would pay American workers is going to stock buybacks instead. Companies buy back their own stock to prop up prices. He writes, “The results are coming in, and guess what? Almost all the extra money is going into stock buybacks. Since the tax cut became law, buy-backs have surged to $88.6 billion. That’s more than double the amount of buybacks in the same period last year, according to data provided by Birinyi Associates.”

Reich says, “Compare this to the paltry $2.5 billion of employee bonuses corporations say they’ll dispense in response to the tax law, and you see the bonuses for what they are—a small fig leaf to disguise the big buybacks.”

Five Rings: The US women’s hockey team beat Finland 5-0 and is headed to the gold medal round. — Russian curler Alexander Krushelnytsky, who won a bronze medal in the Olympics, failed a doping test and awaits the results of a second test to confirm whether he used performance enhancing drugs. Now, let’s talk about this. Do you really need to take drugs to push a disc of granite and sweep the ice with a broom?

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