Reporters on the Job

• Origins of a T-shirt :As correspondent Stephanie Hanes walked through a cavernous clothing factory in Lesotho, she recognized the T-shirts being made.

"They were the same Old Navy T-shirts I had picked up for my husband the last time I was in the US – a bargain, I thought, at about $6 a piece," she says. At the time,she didn't think about where those shirts came from. "I simply scooped up a few and dumped them in my cart."

But the women told Stephanie that the salaries they make in Lesotho – small by US standards, but significant for textile workers in a developing country – mean their families now have enough to eat and their siblings can pay for school.

Doing the story reminded her of "how linked we are in this world, how our smallest decisions in the US can affect a country so unfamiliar to most Americans.... But I live in Africa, for goodness sake. I should know better."

"Shopping alone will not save Africa," she adds. "But it can help. And for the women of Lesotho, that's nothing to be underestimated."

• Tenacious TruthTellers : The Committee to Protect Journalists is honoring four journalists – from Colombia, Yemen, the Gambia, and Iraq – "for their tenacity in reporting the news at great personal risk and at great odds," CPJ Board Chairman Paul Steiger said.

The 2006 honorees are: Atwar Bahjat, correspondent for Al-Arabiya and one of the best-known war reporters in the Arab world, who was murdered in Iraq in February; Jesús Abad Colorado, a freelance photographer in Colombia who captures powerful images of human rights abuses perpetrated by all sides in the conflict; Jamal Amer, the editor of one of Yemen's most independent weeklies, Al-Wasat, whose reporting on corruption, religious militancy, and sensitive political issues has triggered a number of threats and attacks; and Madi Ceesay, a veteran independent journalist from the Gambia who has suffered attacks and imprisonment for his work.

David Clark Scott
World editor