French Cover War, Find Sex

Leave it to Agency Presse France to strip the war experience to its bare essentials:

Ahmad Hadi and his new wife Tiba Mohammad, like many young married couples in Baghdad, are not getting enough sex. The problem, they say, is not a lack of desire but of power - electrical power. Making love for many of Iraq's Muslim population not only requires a willing partner but also a sure supply of water - preferably hot in the winter - to enable the participants to take a shower afterwards before going to pray.

No hot water means no hot shower and therefore prayers, which take place five times a day for devout Muslims, can become a problem.

Either a couple avoids sex or they are forced to take a cold dip, not a pleasant prospect during the winter months.

"I have less sex than I want because there is no hot water to wash with afterwards," moaned Hadi, 25, a Baghdad local who works in the water sector and has only been married for two weeks.

"Sometimes, when we are in the middle of making love the electricity turns off so we have to stop. I get out of bed to put a generator on and then we have to wait for the water to heat up," he told AFP.

Yet more evidence of the gulf between the Muslim world and ours. Here, when the electricity goes off, suddenly a baby boom is nine months off.