An Australian War tourist travelogue of a day trip to Grozny.

Nothing can prepare you for entering a live combat zone. I’ve lived across from Belfast’s notorious Sandy Row and gotten into fisticuffs with an armed and amorous Cambodian soldier in Khmer Rouge territory, but Grozny made everything else look like War-Lite.
The ravaged outskirts of the city were an apocalyptic paean to war and destruction. The idyllic countryside had given way to scarred flatlands littered with the detritus of a decade’s worth of ferocious bombings. Piles of rubble that vaguely resembled buildings were draped in camouflage netting and topped with huge Russian flags in blatant displays of triumphalism. Soldiers manned heavily-fortified checkpoints every hundred metres along the widened road, roughing up anyone of Chechen extraction that didn’t have the roubles to pay them off.

But if the fringe was devastated, then downtown Grozny was obliterated. The Putin Government has told the world that Chechnya is under a policy of “normalisation”, but central Grozny was about as normal as Dresden, circa 1945. Troops in full combat gear stalked the desolate streets alongside massive tanks protecting them from snipers, while Chechen “police” in balaclavas fingered their weapons and looked the other way. There was not a single building that hadn’t been shelled repeatedly, and erstwhile grand facades – Grozny was once a revered centre of culture and the arts – were now, with their gaping maws and sagging foundations, pitiful caricatures of a people under siege. It was in this squalor, sans-electricity, sanitation or potable water, that Chechens made their homes.

We pulled up by a bullet-riddled ‘peace memorial’ to drop the couple off. Unthinking, I opened the car door to get out, but was immediately flung back inside by the terrifying blasts of a nearby skirmish.

Russia
Prime time Russian television and news programs will:

ban any depiction of murder, injury or rape on television between 7am and 10pm. That would cover programmes ranging from news footage of violence in Chechnya to the many popular Hollywood films and TV series broadcast with a dubbed soundtrack

after passage of a bill in the Duma, or lower house.

Afganistan
The Supreme Court in Afganistan has pulled 12 cable channels from Afghan TV.

Cable TV was also banned for a time in 2003 for being un-Islamic following complaints about “half-naked singers and obscene scenes from movies”.

The new government has pulled the channels (mostly available in Kabul) until a new cable law can be made.

Private Ryan wasn’t saved
ABC (American Broadcasting Network) has 225 affialiates across the US.
It is unclear how many stations made the decision not to air the movie on Vetern’s day. Reports range from 18 to 65. The ABC affiliate that we receive on cable, chose not to broadcast the movie.

Update: 66 stations chose not to broadcast Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan was shown on ABC in 2001 and 2002.
Now uncertainty about the FCC fines and decency laws have exactly who in a dither and morass of uncertainty?
The affiliates? The viewers? The network? The FCC?

Sorry about CSI
CBS has issued an apology to viewers for breaking into CSI:NY with a bulletin on Yasser Arafat’s death Wednesday night.

A lot of viewers and CSI fans complained, so the network says it will reair the drama tonight.
Competing networks used a crawl during their shows. CBS blamed their news department.

An overly aggressive CBS News producer jumped the gun with a report that should have been offered to local stations for their late news,” the network said in a statement.

“We sincerely regret the error.”

Update: CBS fired the News producer who did the cut in.