To other bloggers: Read The Whole Thing.

NursingCenter - Library - Journal Issue - Article: "Military nurses in Iraq face heart-wrenching decisions head-on as they provide top-notch care for their patients."

If you are disgusted with the "runaway bride" story that was in the news a couple of weeks ago, read this to help restore your faith in people.

HeraldNet: Wedding was canceled, but not the party: "Put yourself in Katie Hosking's place.

Do you:
a) Pull a runaway-bride stunt?
b) Stay in your room and cry?
c) Turn an unfortunate event into a party for others?

After calling off her wedding 12 days before the planned June 18 ceremony, Hosking and her parents went with the third choice on the list."

Option c) was all the same catering stuff, music, etc. put on for folks from the homeless shelter. The quote at the end is priceless.

Operation Desert Fox: The Four-Day War

Thomas Jocelyn of the Weekly Standard has more on what we knew about Saddam and al Qaeda in the late 1990's. He opens with this these words from bin Laden after Operation Desert Fox, a 4-day bombing campaign against military targets in Iraq:

The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them.

Osama bin Laden, as quoted in various press accounts, December 26, 1998

Looking back, it's surprising how much knowledge we had about relationship between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden, and how much of it is in the public domain, and how little we hear about it.

MercuryNews.com | 06/30/2005 | Afghan designer fashions new success from old cloth: "Rahmani and her clothing line say much about the possibilities in the new Afghanistan -- in Kabul, at least. She is a woman running her own company, something impossible only a few years ago and still unusual enough that she was picked to meet Laura Bush during a visit in March. Rahmani also was featured in Afghan Women and Business magazine. She is 34 and single -- a rarity in Afghanistan."

www.delawareonline.com � The News Journal � NCCo official lends Afghan women a hand: "Farley, general manager of the New Castle County Department of Community Services, was in Afghanistan to help train 23 women who will eventually take a leading role in establishing 50 women's resource centers there. The centers will offer health care, literacy training and other services that were off-limits to women during the Taliban's reign.

Under Taliban rule, women were barred from working outside their homes, education was forbidden and women were punished for showing their faces. Farley came home with an appreciation for the audacity of Afghan women, including one who flouted Taliban convention to secretly educate 100 kids in her home and others who established underground networks to provide health care, schooling and social services.

'It was really touching,' she said, 'a very genuine and almost raw experience to see the adversity Afghan women have confronted.'"

It is the hundreds of stories like this that will slowly...very slowly...bring Afghanistan and Iraq to a better place. It is people like this, doing a little bit every day, that will make the difference. The terrorists get the front pages while the real heroes slog through every day.