Headlines below the fold

Our prayers go out to the families of the Korean ferry disaster.

A town will be in mourning...reminds me of TWA800, where a dozen kids from a PA town were on a field trip and died.

These things happen in the Philippines every couple of years. But was this an "on/off" ferry, or was there a reef nearby?? Not mentioned in the articles I read.

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StrategyPage has the good news from Afghanistan that you won't read in the paper:

The taliban gets headlines but didn't stop the election. And then there is this:

Afghan public health officials recently revealed that life-expectancy had increased from 45 years in 2001 to 63 years now. This, plus the rapid economic growth since 2001 means Afghanistan is no longer the poorest country in Eurasia. The increased life expectancy is largely the result to improved sanitation and medical care, especially for newborns and children under five. One reason for the growing hostility towards the Taliban is the continuing efforts of these Islamic radicals to limit the spread of better health care and economic improvements in general. The most obvious example of this is the continuing Taliban opposition to vaccination programs, which the Taliban consider a Western effort to poison Moslem children. Then there is education, which has rapidly increased, despite constant, and often fatal, Taliban resistance...

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AustinBay at strategypage has a summary of the Ukraine crisis, and how "the big lie" works.

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and this critique of women in combat at strategypage notes:

 None of these proponents of women in the infantry have ever served in the infantry, but they understand that if they proceed without proof that women can handle the job, that decision could come back to hurt them (not to mention getting a lot of American soldiers and marines killed first).
So far the tests, overseen by monitors reporting back to civilian officials in Congress and the White House, have failed to find the needed proof. The main problem the military has is their inability to make these politicians understand how combat operations actually work and what role sheer muscle plays in success, or simply survival... 

Yet women have often been exposed to a lot of indirect combat. As far back as World War II, 25 percent of all troops in the army found themselves under fire at one time or another, although only about 15 percent of soldiers had a "direct combat" job. In Iraq women made up about 14 percent of the military personnel but only two percent of the casualties (dead and wounded). Most women do not want to be in combat but those who do get the job have proven that they can handle it. Moreover many proponents of female infantry fail to appreciate the fact that all these women in combat incidents was not the same as women in the infantry or special operations.

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We couldn't see "the blood moon" here due to clouds. Lots of stupid "prophecy" stuff around the net on this, which is superstition, not religion...

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