Reporters on the Job

• All in the Family: When staff writer Dan Murphy told his Iraqi colleagues in Baghdad he was interested in taking a closer look at Amariyah, a neighborhood overrun by Sunni insurgents, he didn't have to go far to find firsthand information.

The first cousin of a Shiite driver who works for the Monitor had been kidnapped from his neighborhood in northern Baghdad, and his bound body was later found there.

Dan also learned that in March, two next-door neighbors of another Monitor employee, Sunnis with a small garbage-pickup business, were shot and killed when they tried to intervene in a daylight execution by masked gunmen.

"We only have five Iraqi employees, so I figured that this was more than coincidence," says Dan. "There are four or five neighborhoods in Baghdad where it seems almost everyone you meet has had a relative or friend killed, and Amariyah is now one of them."

• Fund for Thieves? Reporter Rachel Scheier attended some of the public hearings in Uganda investigating theft from the Global Fund, the largest single agency in the world set up to combat AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The fund raised more than $5 billion so far from donor governments and private philanthropies. But in Uganda, the agency is synonymous not with fighting disease, but with larceny.

"You hear people say, 'Where did you get that Mercedes Benz? The Global Fund?' " says Rachel. "I recently overheard an argument over the price of a generator. One woman said, 'Look, I'm not rich. I don't have access to the Global Fund.' "

David Clark Scott
World editor