From Strategy Page…

The death of a Russian fighter pilot in Sudan could not be kept secret, despite the best efforts of the Russian and Sudanese governments. The pilot was an instructor, stationed outside Khartoum, at an air base containing the dozen MiG-29 fighters Sudan bought four years ago. The Russian pilot took one of the MiG-29s into action on May 10th, when a convoy of nearly 200 trucks and jeeps approached the capital. The convoy contained 1,200 JEM rebels from Darfur. The heavily armed rebels were headed for the presidential palace when the MiG-29 attacked. But the rebels had some heavy (12.7mm and 14.5mm machine-guns) on some of those trucks, and the MiG-29 was hit and went down. The pilot ejected, but the chute didn’t open and he died on impact.

If the JEM rebels really manged to shoot down a Mig-29 with some heavy machine-guns they are way better then I would have ever thought. Or else the Russian was really sloppy.

From United Press International……

An alarming new word has been born. It is “hypermortality,” which might be defined as an extraordinary tendency toward death. It jumps from the first page of the U.N. Development Program report entitled “Demographic Policy in Russia.”

“The Russian phenomenon of hypermortality comes to be observed primarily in working-age populations,” it says.

“Compared to the majority of countries that have similar levels of economic development, mortality in Russia is 3-5 times higher for men and twice as high for women.”

What this means, the report says, is that the size of the working-age population “will fall by up to 1 million people annually already by 2020-25.”

The effect of this will be to raise the dependency load (the number of young and old people dependent on those of working age) to 670 to 750 per thousand by 2020 and to 900 to 1,000 per thousand by 2025.

Read the whole thing.

From Pajamas Media…..

In what appears to be the biggest case of corruption in Iran, and perhaps in the Middle East, the Tehran-based Shahab News reported that the chief auditing office of the Iranian parliament (Majlis) has revealed that close to $35 billion of oil income from the financial year 2006-07 is missing.

This kind of stuff goes on because Iran’s Parliament has no real power.