Today's Story Line:

Over the past few days, there's been growing alarm about the lack of information and use of depleted uranium munitions by the US and its NATO allies. Today, Scott Peterson brings our readers up to date on the latest reports (page 1). It's an issue he's long covered. He wrote a two-part series on the effects of DU use in Iraq on April 29 and 30, 1999. He also wrote a piece from Djakovica, Yugoslavia, on Oct. 5, 1999, which detailed the use of DU in the Balkans. Readers can find his articles on our website: (www.csmonitor.com).

- Faye Bowers Deputy world editor

REPORTERS ON THE JOB

JOURNALISM's FRONT LINES: Ilene Prusher is finding another Americanism has seeped into the Philippines. Broadcast journalists seek interviews with foreign reporters leaving the trial. One asked Ilene if she would comment on the spectators being thrown out of the courtroom. "Do you think their rights are violated, because they were thrown out?" she was asked. "I gave a diplomatic answer, saying I didn't think it was my place to say. It's one thing to explore an issue in the story, another to make a judgment on national TV," Ilene says.

A GULAG VISIT: Near the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Fred Weir once visited the ruins of a gulag prison camp with an artist who had been imprisoned there during the Soviet era. Tumbledown buildings and strands of barbed wire were still lying on the ground. "The fact that the guy who brought me was such a gentle, sensitive person, not the sort who in Canada [Fred's birthplace] would ever have a brush with the law brought home how many perfectly ordinary Russian people have had run-ins with their state in the 20th century," Fred says. "Any form of social disorder was harshly punished ... and remains embedded in a legal code inherited from the Soviets."

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