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.

When you see all of the things going wrong around us, it can be hard to remember to be grateful for the things that we still have. But this ruling should remind us that there are many things to be grateful for in America. In many countries, such a ruling would have never been issued.

Edit: More from the New York Times….

This article on Burma from Spiegel should have been essay of the week. But it came out to late and I don’t want to want to wait until next week to bring it to peoples attention. It should be read.

This rant is a useful to reminder why many Jews were so committed to the recreation of Israel.

From Time….

That anger is flowing in communities across the disaster zone. While the overall death toll has passed 21,500 and is expected to climb as high as 50,000, there is special tragedy — and perhaps a whiff of scandal — in the number of young people who died in collapsed schools. Communities like Juyuan have had an entire generation of young people wiped out. In the nearby city of Dujiangyan, more than 300 students were killed when the Xinjian Elementary School collapsed. Sixty miles away in the mountainside town of Hanwang, the scene repeated itself at the Dongqi Middle School, where an estimated 200 students died. Five children were killed when two schools even collapsed in Chongqing, the state-run Xinhua News Service reported. The city is more than 200 miles away from the quake’s epicenter.

Abu Muqawama is one of the the blogs that we go to for news on Lebanon. If you are at all interested in what is going on over there, you should read the posts from the last couple of days.

But if that is to much work, just go to this post and scroll to bottom where Abu Muqawama writes….

Tom Perry — friend to both Londonstani and Abu Muqawama — is now reporting for Reuters that Hizbollah/Amal has now taken control over most of Beirut. Oh, if only Abu Muqawama had a nickel for every time an M14 sympathizer swore to him this would never happen. A clue for why it happened might be found in all those pictures of gunmen holding their rifles at the hip, cowboy-style. Great shooting positions, boys!

Look at the picture that he posts next to those words. Then go to this post at Abu Muqawama and look at the picture.

Of course, it is unfair to judge the fighting styles of two different groups just by a couple of pictures. But those pictures back up what people from the region have been saying for a long time.