Reporters' Notebook

MASSIMO CALABRESI, TIME's diplomatic correspondent, traveled last week with Colin Powell during the Secretary of State's peace mission to the Middle East.

"There's something about going to Jerusalem with U.S. diplomats that's different from other State Department trips. Everyone feels the tension here. The stillness of the Sabbath, the call of the muezzin and the tolling of the church bells create an atmosphere of beauty and piety and fear. Every place, no matter how ordinary, seems burdened with the years of violence. Outside our hotel four months ago, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up, wounding two people and sending his own body parts into guests' rooms. And even in the simplest of exchanges, people are frozen between moments of hope and intimidation. At the seam between the Jewish and Armenian quarters one morning last week, the photographer who took this picture and I got a flat tire. An Israeli Arab municipal worker stopped to help. The gentle exchange was disrupted by a raucous Jewish security guard who knew the Arab and roughhoused jokingly with him, demanding, 'Where is your pistol?'

"Against that backdrop, everyone watches for signs of progress. But with suicide bombings and Israeli incursions continuing throughout Powell's trip, seeing hope in diplomacy sometimes feels itself like an act of faith."

JAMES NACHTWEY, a TIME photographer, spent the past week covering the war in the Middle East, focusing his lens primarily on the battlefields of Nablus and Jenin.

"I've covered both of the Palestinian intifadehs, which were not quite full-scale war. They were more civil unrest. But this is more of a full-scale war, period. The most dramatic event I've witnessed so far has been the evacuation of several dozen wounded from a mosque in the Nablus Casbah that had been converted into a makeshift field hospital. It was filled with severely wounded Palestinians, and the courtyard of the mosque was filled with the dead. People had been in this mosque, lying on the floor with virtually no medicine, suffering for, I suppose, several days. They were desperate. The Palestinians were desperate to get their wounded to the hospital in Nablus. They eventually began to just carry them out of the mosque and through the wreckage of the Casbah, across areas where the streets had been completely torn up. They were carrying them on their shoulders."

ANDREW GOLDSTEIN, a staff writer, went to Tulsa, Okla., for this week's cover story and interviewed terminally ill patients taking an experimental melanoma vaccine found to have been manufactured, stored and tested improperly.

"The impact didn't hit me until I accompanied 25-year-old Dawanna Robertson to the hospital where she had received her series of vaccine injections two years ago, which caused her severe side effects, including uncontrollable vomiting and debilitating migraine headaches. The basement lab had been completely redecorated--walls had been torn out, a giant fish tank installed--and yet Dawanna could barely muster the strength to go inside. She was literally shaking. She says that as a result of the melanoma trial, she has lost all faith in the medical profession. She no longer takes drugs for her melanoma and hasn't been to a doctor in more than a year. 'I'm not prepared to be let down again,' she told me. But I also spoke to a few patients in the same trial who believe that the vaccine was a gift from God, that it saved their lives."