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Classmates celebrating 60th birthday with trip to SKorean island among missing in ship sinking
• MOKPO, South Korea (AP) -- Kim Jeong-keun woke up on his cabin bed to find out his friends had smeared lipstick on his face while he had been asleep, a prank harking back to their school days.
• The 60-year-old Kim took it in good spirits and washed his face. After all, they were traveling together on a reunion voyage aboard The Sewol, celebrating their birthdays and remembering good old days from their elementary school in Incheon city, where the ferry departed Tuesday evening.
• Within hours, the 17 former schoolmates were fighting for their lives as the multi-story ferry began to list. Only five of them, including Kim, have been rescued.
• "We gathered once every three months. When we met last time in March, somebody suggested a trip to celebrate our 60th birthdays to Jeju," Kim said from a hospital in Mokpo, where he was being treated for a fracture in a rib bone.
• In South Korea, as in many other countries, 60th birthdays are often celebrated as a milestone in one's lifetime.
• ___
Good news on sign-ups, costs, prompts calls for unabashed defense of 'Obamacare' in campaigns
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- With enrollments higher than expected, and costs lower, some Democrats say it's time to stop hiding from the president's health care overhaul, even in this year's toughest Senate elections.
• Republicans practically dare Democrats to embrace "Obamacare," the GOP's favorite target in most congressional campaigns. Yet pro-Democratic activists in Alaska are doing just that, and a number of strategists elsewhere hope it will spread.
• President Barack Obama recently announced that first-year sign-ups for subsidized private health insurance topped 7 million, exceeding expectations. And the Congressional Budget Office -- the government's fiscal scorekeeper -- said it expects only a minimal increase in customers' costs for 2015. Over the next decade, the CBO said the new law will cost taxpayers $100 billion less than previously estimated.
• Republicans already were pushing their luck by vowing to "repeal and replace" the health care law without having a viable replacement in mind, said Thomas Mills, (Continued on page 28)
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