Reporters on the Job

• Not Quite Club Med: For today's story, correspondent Sam Dagher spent a night with members of the 1st Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment (1-64) in an old Baghdad shopping center now used as a US combat outpost.

"When they moved in last year, they said that rats roamed freely through the dim four-story building. There was no heat during the coldest winter in Iraq's history. And they all complained about the 'Iraq crud' – the dust that got into everything," says Sam.

Now that the soldiers are heading home, the place is being spruced up for the next group of US soldiers. A kitchen and dining room are being installed. The gym is being expanded. "The 1-64 soldiers joked that the unit that's taking over from them wants to turn the outpost into a 'Club Med in Baghdad.'

• Curfew? Not for Me: Reporter Mian Ridge says that Indian officials had imposed a curfew in Kashmir's main city of Srinagar. That made it a bit tricky to get to Srinagar's main mosque to cover the huge protest there.

"It's was an unofficial curfew whereby no one was supposed to be out on the streets – and cars were banned from the roads all around the mosque," she says. But Mian managed to avoid the police by taking an hour-long, circuitous walk, using twisting bylanes. "I accepted an offer of a lift on a scooter on the way, but on the way back I walked," she says.

–David Clark Scott

World editor