Reporters on the Job

• Beautiful Bhopal: Staff writer Scott Baldauf was in college when a poisonous gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed thousands (page 7). He says his images of Bhopal were of corpses, women, and children, all in black-and-white photographs. "So I was surprised to find Bhopal a quite pretty place, full of historic monuments, temples, and mosques scattered around a massive man-made lake built by a prince," he says.

Scott says that interviewing the grieving widows was difficult, but the strangest part was visiting the old Union Carbide site itself. "There were children playing cricket on the site, women gathering grass and leaves for their sheep and cattle, or cutting firewood. When one old man ventured through a hole in the wall to relieve himself, Abdul Jabbar, the community activist who was accompanying me, smiled. 'Good,' he said. 'That's what this place is good for.' "

• Staying in Saudi: Reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah lives in the US, but is visiting family in Saudi Arabia and has her children enrolled in an international school there. The latest attacks in the country by militants bent on sowing fear and undermining the Saudi government have given her pause - as it has many foreigners working in the country (this page).

But she says that she has no plans to pull her children out of school in Saudi. After Saturday's attacks, her daughter's school was locked down. But it wasn't the first time the eighth grader has gone through a lockdown at school. "She went through it after Sept. 11 in Arlington, Va. And during the sniper attacks in Washington, I had to drive her to and from school," notes Faiza.

David Clark Scott
World editor