REPORTING the news still has its ' -- hazards as well as its complications, its divertissements and its rewards. Last week TIME Paris Correspondent James Wilde encountered some of the hazards as he covered the fighting between warring factions in Algeria (see THE WORLD). Running into an exchange of small-arms fire on a road near Aumale, southeast of Algiers, Wilde leaped from his car and hit the ditch. Then, he reported: "The road suddenly came alive with soldiers, who rushed over to where I was lying and forced me at gunpoint to get up and walk over to the car (which, as if not inflammable enough, had two spare cans of gas in the back).

The soldiers were panic-stricken and hysterical. They ordered me to drive them 'out of this dirty mess.' "I tried to explain to them that the car would be certain death and that standing there in full view was also ridiculous. At this moment one of them was shot in the leg. Instead of sobering them, this caused more panic.

Seven of them packed into the car and forced me to turn around and drive off. As I turned I heard a bullet strike the side of the car. The soldier sitting next to the right-hand rear door groaned, sighed and let his head fall back on the seat.

"About one hundred yards farther on, we came across an ambulance. I stopped and the soldiers got out. The man in the back didn't move. When I tried to open the door I noticed a neatly drilled hole. A bullet had entered his right shoulder, pierced his chest and then his heart. He must have died a few moments after being hit.

"No one would help get his body out of the car. Several came up and just stared. All the cliches came true: the dead man's gun was gripped hard between his hands, and so I had to pry open his fingers one by one. Then the gun was jammed against the car roof. He was terribly heavy, as dead bodies are supposed to be. When I finally managed to drag him out, the road was under fire. The ambulance driver then helped me lift the corpse onto a stretcher and we put it into the ambulance."

WORKING on this week's cover story. Writer Jesse L. Birnbaum and Reporter Neil MacNeil came under a more diverting kind of barrage: they were fired upon with polysyllables. At the end of their first three-hour interview with Senator Everett Dirksen, they had got through the story of just the first 25 years of his life. MacNeil went on with seven more hours of interviewing, and at one point, to check the story that Dirksen keeps his pants pockets full of enough odds and ends to cover a variety-store counter, he asked the Senator to empty the contents on the spot. Dirksen complied: a pocket knife, a St. Christopher medal, an empty leather pillbox, a cold sniffer, an odd-shaped piece of rough jade, a magnifying reading glass, a 1955 medal of the Kewanee. Ill., Masonic Lodge, a silver dollar money clip, two heavily burdened key rings, and a quarter.

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