] The way people were grabbing at the man walking along
] Paradise Square here, he may as well have been giving
] away bottled water or satellite telephones or chunks of
] gold, people were so aggressive. But he was not. He was
] giving away information.
]
] Newspapers have hit the streets here for the first time
] since the government stopped publishing April 8. Never
] mind that "yesterday's" editions were nearly a week old.
] Or that they did not really contain any news that people
] here did not know.
]
] In a city craving information, the newspapers were
] devoured as if they contained the secret formula for
] surviving the aftermath of a war that has cut off
] electricity, deprived many people of clean water and
] indefinitely suspended government paychecks.
]
] The paper, called Tarieq Al-Shaab, or The Way of the
] People, had no answers. But its mere existence in Baghdad
] - people have been executed for smuggling it from
] northern Iraq since it was banned in 1979 by Saddam
] Hussein - made its pages worth reading.

I can identify with this feeling so strongly. Even with all my own access to thousands of information sources around the world, I frequently felt "out of the loop" on what was going on in Iraq, and I felt like I couldn't find enough information to satisfy my hunger. To have been in the middle of it though, with no access to internet, phones, television, or even newspapers, would have been a deep circle of hell for me. So I'm delighted that the Iraqi people are getting their newspapers going again, and I wish them all the best in accessing as many different sources of news as they can get their hands on.

Let the information flow!

Iraqis Hunger for Information