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Shannon hasn’t vanished. She’s merely left Typepad after a spell and now seems sort of suspended between WordPress and Blogger:

…I recently decided to leave my Typepad blog, since I was no longer willing to pay. Unfortunately, I did a stupid thing, and cancelled my Typepad account before pretty much anyone could have had a chance to see my post alerting to the change.

Anyway, I’ve got the Typepad blog up for free at WordPress, for now. I may end up staying there, or I may end up coming back here. I’m just posting this here now in case anyone stumbles across it wondering what happened to the old blog.

I know, I know. Fat chance. But you never know…

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UPDATE: At least Shannon had for a time meant to be invisible. In contrast, Laban didn’t:

…Judging by the fact that my last 20 referrers match my last 20 visitors, it seems that I’ve had an invisible blog for the last 6 hours.

Now, thankfully, he’s back.

Reuters:

A joint force of Ethiopian and Somali government troops advanced Wednesday to just 18 miles (30 kilometers) from Islamist-held Mogadishu, but a representative said they would besiege the Somali capital rather than attack it.

“We are not going to fight for Mogadishu, to avoid civilian casualties. Our troops will surround Mogadishu until they [the Islamists] surrender,” Ambassador Abdikarin Farah told reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia…

…The rapid offensive came hours after Ethiopia, defending the Somali interim government, said it was halfway to crushing the Islamists, heightening fears its next step would be to use airstrikes and ground troops to seize the capital…

After a string of victories much praised by certain media for bringing order to chaos, the Islamists are now losing. . .

. . . Quick! Somebody . . . “stop the war!”

Let’s eliminate the superfluous — for Agence France-Presse is infamous for asides — and stick to the point:

Though nearly 3,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq, medical advances mean the number is a lot lower than would have been expected…

…Though US forces are stretched, many more US combat troops are surviving battlefield wounds than in past wars, due in part to rapid and vastly improved medical attention…

…”In World War II, about 30 percent of American servicemembers wounded in combat died,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report in June…

That AFP writer evidently got that figure from this GAO report, June 30, 2006:

…DOD has reported that as of June 26, 2006, over 19,000 servicemembers have been wounded in action since the onset of OEF and OIF. Some of these servicemembers are surviving injuries that would have been fatal in past conflicts. In World War II, about 30 percent of American servicemembers wounded in combat died…

That paragraph’s “footnote 10″ provides no inkling as to the source of that “30 percent” number. (The construction of the sentence is such that it does NOT appear to come from the DOD.) So it is something of a mystery from where the GAO got it. Given what a multitude of other sources on that subject have told us over the last 60 years, that GAO number sounds ridiculously high, so some allowance may have to be made for the possibility that someone might be trying to exaggerate WWII death rates in order to make it seem as if death figures are decidedly lower for OIF and OEF.

For example, on the percentage of wounded who died in WWII, according to “That Men Might Live! The Story of the Medical Service, ETO“:

…In World War I, 8 percent of the wounded died. In World War II, the figure in the ETO was 3.9 percent. Contributing factors were vast amounts of medicine, blood plasma, whole blood, sulfa drugs, penicillin and new anesthetics like sodium pentathol which could be transported easily and administered without elaborate equipment…

Perhaps that GAO figure does not draw a distinction between those hit at the front line and those who were safely evacuated? In Patton’s Third Army, for example, wounded had a survival rate of over 95% for those who were gotten back to a field hospital. And that makes sense; after all, if you are shot and don’t get medical attention it’s hardly surprising that you will die. In fact, it’s a surprise if you die only a quarter of the time. And getting wounded quick treatment today is usually far easier than it was in Lorraine or in the Ardennes in late 1944.

In any event, that AFP piece has now gotten us thinking on the matter of scientific advancement. Incidentally, if AFP would also have checked, they would have discovered that two-thirds of the 620,000 soldiers (on both sides) who died in the American Civil War succumbed not to combat wounds, but to disease:

…Healthy recruits became victims of illnesses that were easily spread due to the large number of people in the camps, the often unsanitary conditions, and the poor diet of the soldiers. Childhood diseases such as measles could devastate regiments and many men succumbed to diarrhea and dysentery. Of the nearly 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War, two-thirds died not of bullets and bayonets, but of disease…

Hmmm. So, what’s the U.S. military’s disease death rate in — as AFP describes it — “its global war on terror”? Does AFP happen to know? If they don’t yet, when they find out one suspects that advances in that quarter will astound them even more so.

Reuters concocts “news” (again):

Apparently, in Reuter-world there were nearly 3,000 U.S. military casualties in the 9/11 attacks. Okay, yes, we know what they really mean . . . although, considering they are a “news” service (clear English and precise text is their job), one would think we should not have to read between the lines.  But given what they are evidently implying (and they had better be, because the story is utterly vacuous if they aren’t), I guess we are supposed to interpret that comparison as meaning the jihadists have won? 

Oddly, though, although a hard figure is difficult to come by, the consensus is that the U.S. military has also killed many thousands more jihadists than non-combatants who died September 11.  Yet that is not evidently supposed to be factored into Reuters’s narrow calculation. But if it were, of course Reuters would then assert such as demonstrating how the U.S. has engaged in “a disproportionate response“.

Anyway, the former stance is perfectly consistent of Reuters. We have in the past seen other similarly solid grasps of an overall situation imparted to a public hungry for Reuters’s insightful analytical reportage.  Why I even remember it like it was yesterday how . . . back in, umm, December 1917, wouldn’t ya know, there was also this, urr, Reuters web report supplied to Yahoo! News:

Obituaries of important figures are tough for media. Of course what is always headlined is the famous (and/or infamous) action. But let’s leave out such (and we know what in this case those are: “unelected” and “pardon” — see, based on those two words you probably even know already who I’m talking about) for a moment, and just stick to the human being himself. The BBC tells us:

…Gerald Ford was known for his openness, sunny disposition and most important, his honesty…