For the past couple of days I've been keeping you up to date on our two stranded NASA astronauts on the International Space Station.    Today, NASA shared one more scary bit of news : Their assessment is that if Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were to soon return on the semi-crippled Starliner spacecraft, the odds of not making it back alive would only be 1 in 270. Sure, if a horse had those same odds, it would almost never win. However, two human lives are worth a lot more than a losing horse. Consider this: According to a 2017   Harvard University   study, the odds that your plane will crash are one in 1.2 million, and the odds of dying from a crash are one in 11 million. Your chances of dying in a car accident, meanwhile, are one in 5,000 . In other words, you would have a 40,740 times better chance on a successful commercial flight than what is facing those astronauts. Another study found that more than 95% of aircraft occupants survived the crash. Two other ways...

The Israel-Hamas War seems to be escalating.  However, Egypt is beginning to allow foreigners to enter from the Rafah Gate in southern part of the Gaza Strip.   Updates here,   From the morning  New York Times: That is the conclusion of   a new study   by Patrick Sharkey and Megan Kang at Princeton. Stricter gun laws passed by 40 states from 1991 to 2016 reduced gun deaths by nearly 4,300 in 2016, or about 10 percent of the nationwide total. States with stricter laws, such as background checks and waiting periods, consistently had fewer gun deaths, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: But on to our cruise.  Aomori is the the capital city of Aomori Prefecture.  Means Blue Forest, with a current population of around 265,000, the northern most of Honshu Island.  There were 319,000 people living here in 2000, and this number has since then been declining, as is the entire country, which was up to 127 million in 2007, but is today d...