Reporters on the Job

• A PROTEST IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Reporter Dan Murphy lives in the same Jakarta neighborhood as Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, which is also the same neighborhood where former Indonesian President Suharto lives. After Suharto's fall, student protests in the neighborhood were common, with a typical day filled with chants for the former dictator to be prosecuted for human rights crimes or to pay back the billions that Indonesian officials allege his family stole.

But all had gone quiet until a few weeks ago, when the students began to focus on Indonesia's current president - making meeting with students once more very convenient for Dan. Last night, as he was putting the finishing touches on today's story, Dan heard chanting and drumming, so he poked his head out the window, expecting another protest. "Megawati's police security detail had laid aside their plastic shields and batons and were dancing and singing Indonesian pop songs in the street," says Dan. "They told me they were bored."

• RAPES IN SOUTH AFRICA: Reporter Nicole Itano says her mother was "terrified" by the rape statistics (page 1) when Nicole moved to Johannesburg. But she says rape rates in white neighborhoods are about the same as the US. "It's much worse in the poor townships, where 90 percent of the rapes are by perpetrators known by the victims - often relatives," Nicole says. In the court she visited, 70 percent of the cases involved minors.

• GRENADA REGIME CHANGE: In the timeline on Jan. 27 (page 13) the item about the 1983 US military intervention in Grenada should have stated that Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, who was pictured, was executed during a military coup prior to the US invasion.

David Clark Scott
World editor

Cultural snapshot