IRIN News, a part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recently ran this poignant look at what life in Baghdad is like, written by Lina Massufi, an Iraqi widow with 2 young children. She writes,
“I cannot stand the constant military raids in my home. Every time they [the soldiers] raid my house, they break the door. They don’t know how to knock at a door. One day, when I asked them why they were entering like that instead of ringing the bell, they laughed at me and called me an idiot.
My furniture is all broken into pieces because of the way they conduct their searches. I no longer have dishes or glasses to speak of because they destroyed most of them during the raids.
“I have two children and for most of the time, they are scared. Muhammad, a four-year-old, cannot sleep well at night. He has nightmares every day and when he wakes up he cries, asking me not to let the soldiers take him as they took his uncle.”
As I am posting this, I am sitting in my warm home, sipping coffee in a nice china mug, as my son sleeps soundly in his bed. All I can do is weep.
Abandoned historic site becomes porn studio–Film at 11
Talk about urban renewal with an attitude. Just when we were recovering from Joe Francis and the (underage) Girls Gone Wild, along come the guys at Kink, a web-based porn company which just bought an old armory building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the ooze and ahhh’s of the San Francisco Chronicle, Kink plans to use the building, which used to be a military induction center and has been deserted since 1970, to shoot porn films for their websites. The building is oh-so-right for them because it includes a basement that can be used as a dungeon and a boiler room that is just perfect, according to Kink filmmaker James Mogul,
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