Franz Kafka wrote, "We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Here's some good news from Cambodia, even though it's related to the tragedy that happened there in the 1970s.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/07/03/khmer-trials.html

I visited Tibet in 1987 and was very involved with the Canada Tibet Committee for several years after that, so this news story caught my attention.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5133220.stm

"It's the birthday of editor and writer William Strunk Jr., born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). His book The Elements of Style has become the standard style manual for writers all across America. Strunk wrote, ' Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.' "

- from "The Writer's Almanac" (Garrison Keillor, National Public Radio [NPR] in the U.S.)