Good luck, John Kerry. Be careful out there.
  • @JohnKerry
  • Good luck, John Kerry. Be careful out there.

• Plane Crashes in Taiwan, 47 Trapped, Feared Dead: The number 51 is also out there in terms of fatalities... and 40. The plane was landing on a small island during a typhoon.

• MH17: First Victims' Bodies Arrive in Netherlands: And Ukraine says two fighter jets have been shot down by "separatists." Jesus.

• John Kerry Flies to Israel to Push for Ceasefire: And good luck to him.

• "Republicans aren't good at ground games in Alaska. That's their weakness": A report from merry old England on the midterm elections in the US's Last Frontier.

• Rain Forecast for Fire Zones—So Next Threat Is Flash Floods: Slopes that had all their vegetation burned off are particularly vulnerable to floods and slides. After that, maybe locusts?

• Listeria Risk Prompts Fruit Recall: If you bought peaches, nectarines, plums, or pluots at Costco, Trader Joe's, Kroger, or Walmart anywhere in the United States recently, check them for a sticker that says "SWEET 2 EAT." They are not sweet to eat. As you may have noticed, the bigger our agricultural industrial complex gets, the more these potentially deadly things happen, because of lack of oversight on stuff like washing fruit and because of nationwide distribution from big operations—it's out of control.

• China Arrests Five in Expired Meat Scandal: The Chinese factory that was allegedly repackaging and selling expired meat is owned by the OSI Group right here in the USA, in Aurora, Illinois. Why, look at that nice farmer leaning on a fence! And their tagline is "A World of Food Solutions." The factory that OSI owns in Shanghai was distributing meat to McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Burger King, Papa John's, and 7-Eleven.

"We found that some of the illegal conduct was not that of certain individuals but was an arrangement organized by the company," the deputy director of the agency's Shanghai bureau, Gu Zhengua, told the official Xinhua News Agency.

A world of food solutions, indeed.

• The Most Popular Story on seattletimes.com Right Now Is From 2007: It's about a guy named Steve Flaig who was working at a Lowe's in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and found his birth mother working the cash register. Steve Flaig lives in Vancouver, Washington, now; I reached him at work at a construction company. "That's really, really odd," he said. He said he's sure his mom is doing well, but that they don't really talk all that much. "To be honest," he said, "all that stuff kind of happened, and then we went back to the way things were. I know it's not very exciting." He's been in Vancouver for a couple years. He sounds like a really nice guy. He looked the story up on seattletimes.com, and then he said, "That's totally bizarre."