Reporters on the Job

• Good Chemistry: The attention that has descended upon Egyptian chemist Magdy al-Nashar (this page) has rippled through the neighborhood where he lives. "We had the exact address, but we were winding hopelessly through the narrow, broken alleys," says reporter Charles Levinson. "When we started asking people on the street for help, we found that everyone knew where "the doctor" lived. During his first meeting with Dr. Nashar, Charles had to fight his way through dozens of journalists who had camped out in the stairwell of his apartment building.

At the second interview, a few days later, it was just as busy. "I called his home to set up the meeting and his mother answered the phone," says Charles. "She sounded as if she was beaming when she asked, 'Did you see my son on TV?'

"Nashar comes across as a truly genuine and sweet individual. By our second conversation we had begun to develop a relationship. He paused in the midst of talking about all the bad things that had been written about him in the British media, and asked me, 'Charles, what do you think of me? Do you like me?'"

• Where are the Settlers? Staff writer Ilene Prusher says that when she walks around the Israeli settlements in Gaza, she finds that it's just as likely that she'll meet an outsider as a settler (page 1). "There are so many people who have slipped into the settlements illegally that it is becoming more difficult to find the original settlement residents as opposed to people who have arrived in the past few days," she says.

"Among those who've come here to protest the disengagement plan are a lot of Americans: immigrants from the US who live in Israel proper or in the West Bank settlements. There's even a state assemblyman from New York: Dov Hikind from Brooklyn," she says.

David Clark Scott
World editor