30 dead prostitutes, gnawed by wolves

I tracked down an old friend from high school the other day. After going to college out of state and spending some time in China, he's now working toward a Master's in Journalism at my alma mater. It made me whistful--whistful for friends long lost, whistful for the pearl that is Missoula, and whistful for the career in journalism I've not had.

That whistfullness for journalism quickly fades. It's always one of two types of journalism that brings me down. In the first, Fox News or CNN-quality reporting tickles my gag reflex enough to turn me off. In the second, journalistic integrity isn't the problem; it's reality's well-known liberal bias regailing me with another genocide, scandal, or body count from Iraq. I don't have a strong stomach for such things. I had been feeling particularly whistful, and it took something so terribly of the latter category to bring me back down.

Today's news comes from the land of the "control shot". In a bizarre tail that was barely mentioned in Western or even Russian news: 30 Russian women were found, aged 13-26, in various states of decomposition having been variously consumed by local wildlife.

No, the wolves weren't responsible. Apparently some Russian gangsters from Nizhny Tagil had a racket going. You see, they'd go into town, sweet talk a young lady, take her back to their place, gang rape her, and then force her into a life of prostitution. Great business model, right? What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing, some of the courageous young women decided that they wouldn't be party to it. What's a mobster to do?

These mobsters apparently found a way to deal with the recalcitrant ones; they simply took them out in the woods and killed them. At first they were careful about disposing of the bodies, but, after a few years of nobody noticing they just started dumping them. According to The eXile, disappearances aren't really that uncommon in Nizhny Tagil. In 2 years there were 1,409 disappearances in the sleepy town of 400,000.

What does this have to do with my chosen profession? I have an immense amount of respect for journalists who bring us all manner of news from around the globe. They are performing an invaluable service for humanity. But, I'm having a hard enough time being a reader of the news these days. I can't quite bring myself to be the guy writing it just yet.