By MATTHEW D. LAPLANTE, Salt Lake Tribune

SULAMANIYAH, Iraq - Construction cranes, dozens upon dozens of them, stand over this city in defiance of the past, stretching across the skyline as if reaching for the future.

And here, in the mountains of northern Iraq, that future seems as bright as the golden sun emblazoned on the ubiquitous flag of Kurdistan.

Female veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder aren't getting proper medical help, even though they suffer at about the same rate as their male counterparts, experts say.

SALT LAKE CITY - Hill Air Force Base's top officer has ordered an investigation into whether prescription drug abuse may be a factor in a troubling number of suicides among base employees.

SALT LAKE CITY - If Jackson Pollock had worked on whiteboards, his art might have looked something like the piece hanging on the wall of Matthew Samore's office.

The board is a jumbled mess of colors, figures and lines. But underneath the dry-erase abstract is order -- or the potential for it.

SALT LAKE CITY - An F-16 fighter pilot dropped a 500-pound bomb and two external fuel tanks onto an uninhabited area of Hill Air Force Base in Utah this week in response to an in-flight emergency.

The mother wrapped her arms around her 1-year-old daughter's body. The nurse held the child's head. And the doctor worked, stitch by stitch, to repair a laceration that stretched from the little girl's cheek to her lip.
There was no anesthetic to ease the child's pain.

This land is his land. But it is a land born of slavery, which came of age under Jim Crow and still struggles today to live down that legacy.
And yet Carl Wright would die for it.

The last time Israel went to war, its enemy stood stronger after the dust settled.
But last weekend's air assault on the Gaza Strip, roundly expected to be followed by additional military operations this week, is unlikely to empower Hamas in the same way Israel's much-criticized 2006 operations in Lebanon did for Hezbollah.

A team of security contractors was responding to incoming fire when it gunned down at least 14 Iraqi civilians in a west Baghdad intersection -- and radio logs prove it, according to the lawyer of a former Marine from Utah who was on the Blackwater Worldwide security detail known as "Raven 23."

From lifeblood to lifesaver: how Anthrax Immune Globulin is made -- and how it might work. - Military members and veterans who have received the anthrax vaccine give plasma. - The plasma is frozen, shipped to a laboratory, screened for infections and combined with plasma from other donors.