Reporters on the Job

Two Boys and a Story: When correspondent Ben Lynfield decided to report on Israel's planned pullout from the Gaza settlements, he decided to take a different approach: look at it through the eyes of two children (page 1).

He spotted Daniel's father, Meir, in an article on Friday in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahrono. The story mentioned Daniel's school woes.

"I called Meir and asked him if I could meet Daniel, which he arranged," says Ben. "I met Nati when I stopped a bunch of kids coming out of school to ask if they were going to the demonstration at the Knesset today. Then I learned that Nati was friends with Daniel and in the same class. I've been told that parental permission is necessary when publishing interviews with minors - and it also strikes me as the right thing to do - so I called his mother, who proved very open to an article being written about her son."

Riding Out a Quake: Earthquakes occur with some regularity in Tokyo. So after eight years in Japan, correspondent Bennett Richardson knew immediately that when Saturday's quake struck, it was a big one (this page). "I was standing in the kitchen in our sixth floor flat, at about 6 p.m., and it really shook. It was hard enough that I hoped the building would remain standing."

He flipped on the TV to see what was happening. During the next hour, there was a series of aftershocks as strong as the first quake. "I decided to watch from the safety of the doorway," he notes. When there was a report that a 200 m.p.h. bullet train had jumped the tracks going full speed during the quake, "I thought, 'That's going to be the central disaster of the quake.' I was wrong. It stayed within the concrete barriers on each side and ground to a halt. Everyone walked away. That's a tribute to the design."

David Clark Scott
World editor

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