Reporters on the Job

• Anger Surfaces: The Monitor's Baghdad driver, Adnan, experienced in a small way how Iraqis associated with foreigners are lumped into the same category when it comes to people taking out their anger and frustration. Outside Abu Ghraib prison Thursday (this page) Adnan had parked the car on the side of the highway while staff writer Dan Murphy and an interpreter waded into the crowd to talk about the detainees.

While they were gone, a man approached Adnan and asked him if he was with the journalist. Adnan said yes, and then got behind the wheel of the car to move it into the shade. Seconds later he heard a loud crack from behind him and was showered with shattered glass - someone had destroyed his back windshield. Adnan didn't see who did it. But he says many Iraqis equate American reporters with American forces and figures that's why his car was attacked.

• It's About the Bubbles: It may sound sacrilegious coming from a reporter based in the Land of Evian and Perrier, but Peter Ford says he doesn't really care where his water comes from so long as it is wet (page 7). But he does, occasionally, feel like bubbles, and in Paris, he has an embarras de choix [an embarrassment of choices]. "There's gentle bubbles, heavy bubbles, big bubbles and light bubbles in a range of different mineral waters," he notes. Peter opts for the heavy fizz. But he is still nostalgic for the service offered when he lived in Buenos Aires, where a company delivered crates of glass seltzer bottles, tinted pale blue or green, outside his front door each Monday morning. And he's not picky about the carbonation process. "Who cares whether the fizz comes from a cylinder of carbon dioxide at the bottling plant or occurs naturally underground?" he asks.

David Clark Scott
World editor

CULTURAL SNAPSHOT