Blood sport

Chico Harlan (The Washington Post): MAGUINDANAO, PHILIPPINES - Lt. Col. Benedict Arevalo headed to a ramshackle town hall one afternoon last week to join about 100 local candidates who had gathered to sign an agreement promising not to kill one another in the final days of campaigning before local elections Monday.

About 70 percent of the population owns guns here on the Philippines' main southern island of Mindanao, and politics seems a lot like combat, as candidates from feuding families and clashing religions battle for even the smallest chunks of power.

(What didn't make the paper):

Harlan (The similarity between copperheads and roadside bombs): So let's start with the facts, blameless and final. Let’s start with a road, almost entirely dark, but for the lights of five vehicles: In order, a bulletproof Humvee, a Hyundai SUV, a white minivan, another Hyundai SUV and a KM 450 cargo truck. It was a Thursday. It was 6:25 p.m. I was sitting in the middle row of the white minivan, alongside a youngish Philippine army colonel named Benedict Arevalo. We’d been together all day, and I liked him. I was no longer interviewing him, and my notebook was closed, and he was talking about something I still cannot recall. It is only the things hereafter that I remember with frame-by-frame detail.

-eddie