Reporters on the Job

• A Complete Picture : Correspondent Simon Montlake has visited Cambodia before, but this was his first trip to the killing fields. Previously, he had seen the notorious detention center in Phnom Penh that was once a school where some 17,000 people had been interrogated before being trucked to the fields to be killed.

"But the school was really only one part of the story. I hadn't seen the other side until this trip. After torturing people, the Khmer Rouge them to this lonely forest clearing and shot them. The forest is gone and now it's surrounded by farms and villages. But the ride is down a very bumpy dirt road," says Simon.

He can see the value of having a private company come in and upgrade the road (this page). "But the idea of profiting from genocide, that's hard to get my head around. It's hard to see the Germans, for example, deciding to privatize Auschwitz," he says.

While in Cambodia, Simon purchased a copy of the documentary "S21," which was the code name for the detention center. "Two of the seven survivors of the detention center go back and look through the archives and are introduced to some of their torturers. What's so perplexing about the Cambodian guards is that there seems to be no remorse," he says.

• A Story Blocking Her Way : The inspiration for today's story about Germany's ecofriendly pedicabs (page 7), came while Isabelle de Pommereau was out riding her bike. But her first brush with the vehicles wasn't exactly a positive one. "There was this big thing blocking my way on the bike path. Then, I began to notice that there were more and more of the Velotaxis around my home in Frankfurt. While they started in Berlin seven years ago, they're just beginning their second year here."

David Clark Scott
World editor