IRAQ

Sidney Morning Herald: Western vice - Iraq's new tyrant
Iraq's brutal dictatorship has been replaced by a crime wave. Now sex and
drugs are freely available on the street, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad.
It is 10am and the crowd is pouring into the seedy Al Najah cinema on
Baghdad's Al Rasheed Street. They come, at 70 cents a ticket, for sex on a
loop - fleshy scenes from a dozen B-grade movies spliced into a single
program, for which there is standing room only.

In Sadoun Street the midday temperature is 50 degrees and the prostitutes
tout for business from the shade of a beach umbrella. Further along, in
Fidros Square - where US troops stage-managed the demolition of a statue of
Saddam Hussein on April 9 - as many as 30 teenagers are sniffing glue and
paint thinner. Drug dealers in the treacherous Bab al Sharqi markets, just
off central Tahrir Square, are doing a brisk trade in looted prescription
drugs.