Poor Mojo's Newswire

"The death of the DVD business has been more accelerated in the adult business than mainstream," said Bill Asher, co-chairman of adult industry giant Vivid Entertainment, who estimates that his company's revenue is down more than 20% this year. "We always said that once the Internet took off, we'd be OK," he added. "It never crossed our minds that we'd be competing with people who just give it away for free." There are plenty of other signs of the porn industry's pain. Attendance at the Adult Entertainment Expo, an annual trade show in Las Vegas that's open some days to the public, was down 20% this year. Pay-per-view programming, a key revenue source for the industry, has fallen about 50% from its peak three or four years ago, according to a person familiar with the cable and satellite TV business.

We got the feeling from his press conference that things weren't quite resolved between Mark Sanford and his Argentina-based lover. Now The State has published emails the pair sent each other last year -- and they definitely reinforce that impression. The conservative Republican waxes eloquent, telling his lover Maria, among other things:

MIAMI – When the FBI investigated the landmark 1972 porno movie "Deep Throat," the case touched the highest levels of the FBI, even its second-in-command W. Mark Felt, the shadowy Watergate informant whose "Deep Throat" alias was taken from the movie's title. The FBI documents newly released to The Associated Press reveal the bureau's sprawling and ultimately vain attempt to stop the spread of a movie some saw as the victory of a cultural and sexual revolution and others saw as simply decadent. Agents seized copies of the movie, had negatives analyzed in labs and interviewed everyone from actors and producers to messengers who delivered reels to theaters. "Today we can't imagine authorities at any level of government — local, state or federal — being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind," said Mark Weiner, a constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law. "The story of 'Deep Throat' is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream."

An actress who works in Southern California's pornography industry has tested positive for HIV, renewing county and state health officials' concerns that the adult entertainment industry lacks sufficient safety measures to prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.... As the clinic downplayed the positive test, public health officials cited their ongoing battle with the porn industry over the use of condoms during filming. The two sides have been at odds for years, and despite the intense scrutiny, Fielding said he is concerned that condoms are still not being used. "You wouldn't send someone to work on a high-rise building without a hard-hat, so why are we allowing these performers to perform without condoms?" Fielding said.