Reporters on the Job

• A SUICIDE BOMBER'S ACT: To report today's story about the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, Ben Lynfield went to the home where family and friends were mourning (page 7). "Wafa Idris's mother was so distraught that I did not attempt to question her," says Ben. "But Wafa's friends said that anyone doing Wafa's job - treating Palestinians wounded by the Israeli army - could have reacted in the same way. 'We all speak of these things. But she lived them,' one told me. It reminded me of how those who knew the Jewish settler physician Baruch Goldstein had explained his massacre of 29 Palestinians at Hebron in 1994. Goldstein had snapped after treating Israeli settlers who were wounded in Palestinian attacks."

• GUARDING THE GUARDS: Philip Smucker put a lot of miles into chasing today's story (this page). He left Khost traveling some 80 miles over rough terrain to Ghazni yesterday. "It's outlaw territory, and we'd heard there are Al Qaeda soldiers in the area. We didn't know who we'd run into, so we were pretty nervous. At one point, we were tailed by a taxi for several hours. We finally got there, and found out that fighting had broken out back in Gardez [a city about halfway between Khost and Ghanzi]."

Phil hired two Northern Alliance body guards and headed back to Gardiz. But at one point the guards became a liability. "We stopped briefly in the village of Zarmat to talk to the local security chief. But we had to be careful about how we introduced our non-Pashtun guards. A few days earlier, Northern Alliance men had help US forces search Pashtun homes in Zarmat. We worried that returning with Northern Alliance soldiers might provoke local wrath."

- David Clark Scott

World editor

Cultural snapshot