It's 53 degrees in Baghdad. 

Yesterday Raghad, one of our local stringers, returned from Sunday mass with incense and candles. She lit the candles then let the incense waft throughout our offices here in the Hamra Hotel as she murmured prayers. She'd asked the priest to pray for all us journalists since a young British cameraman was shot on Saturday. Someone just walked up to him in the middle of a crowd and shot him in the back of the head at close range. This, coupled with the very similar shooting of a US soldier standing in line to buy a pepsi at a cafeteria the other day, has raised concerns here that Westerners in general, not just military, have become targets. We move around with flak jackets. In this heat, it is highly unpleasant.

I've never been to Baghdad before so I really don't have anything to compare this current situation with. We're alternately welcomed or aggressively received wherever we move. There is an unhealthy vibe around, sustained, no doubt, by the simmering heat. More than one
Iraqi has told me that things wouldn't be nearly so bad if it weren't so hot.

Funny how the coalition could have saved itself a lot of trouble if it had only invaded in the winter. It's the biggest problem _ power is sporadic, people buy loads of airconditioners to fend off the heat and the mass reliance on electricity leads to more power outages, a
neverending cycle of frustration, which is just fodder for more complaints against the Americans. 

The garish villas and the ordinary apartment buildings are dusted with the same dirty mustard yellow. Large panels dot highways and building entrances bearing the same blacked out silhouette. Some people call him Charlie here. An Iraqi Airways stewardess said to me today:
"Despite all the hardship now, everything that we're going through, it's fine because Charlie's gone. Even the weather is better now." 

It is so freaky to see the US and Australian forces (to date, no Brits) acting as an occupation, one that is almost identical to the Israeli occupation on so many levels. We're frisked at checkpoints and have to slowly approach tanks and apcs. There's an 11pm curfew....