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	Border Patrol Catches Flak at Arizona Checkpoint by Miriam Davidson with photos by Jeffry D. Scott A spring shower has just ended, and as the sun sets over southern Arizona, five United States Border Patrol agents work quickly to reopen a traffic checkpoint on the main highway north from Nogales. The checkpoint, which is taken down during bad weather to prevent accidents, has been closed for about an hour.
	How Edgar Bolaños Became Shy Boy in El Salvador Text and photos by Donna DeCesare Soyapango, El Salvador — During pre-dusk hours when school children in crumpled uniforms race home, past the maquila factory workers wearily descending from buses, Shy Boy and his friends emerge alert and ready for business. They scatter in clusters around their cul-de-sac. Several move towards a grocery store, displaying their crop of gold chains and other “hot” items for interested buyers.
	Report from Abkhazia by Andrew Meier with photos by Mia Foster SUKHUMI — One afternoon not long ago in the beleaguered capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-proclaimed republic on the Black Sea, its reigning satrap, Vladislav Ardzinba, paced his spartan office, nervously awaiting a call from Moscow. On his untidy oak desk, amidst Soviet maps and tomes on medieval Abkhaz history, sat a satellite telephone. Since the spring, when Abkhazia’s long distance lines were cut, satellites became the sole bridges to the world beyond its narrow borders. When the call finally came, half a year late, the news was good. In the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin had at last stirred. “Bring me Ardzinba,” he instructed an aide, “…it’s time to settle this thing.”
The United States, Libya and the Liberian Civil War by Kenneth Noble MONROVIA, Liberia — The Liberian civil war strikes many Westerners as a incomprehensible jumble of tribes, feuding warlords and senseless mayhem. How else can one describe what began as an effort to overthrow a much-loathed despot — Samuel Kanyon Doe — and ended seven years later with hundreds of thousands of people having been slaughtered in the genocidal aggression that became the war’s signature? Put those facts together, along with an assortment of child soldiers, torturers and death squad assassins, and the result is a conflict that is the epitome of African war: bizarre and perplexing to the outsider, and apparently meaningless.
	Are Regulators Being Bought Off by the HMO Money Machines? by Fred Schulte The health agency fired Elizabeth Page Anderson-McGivern and Rosemary Arbuckle-Anderman last spring for violating restrictions on moonlighting within the health care industry. Both workers were program analysts, helping decide which HMOs got Medicaid contracts. The state alleges they took money from HMOs in exchange for preparing applications for Medicaid contracts.
	The Lessons of Ida Tarbell by Steve Weinberg Tarbell’s relentless curiosity, the most significant trait of great investigative reporters, developed during her years at college and on her first job, as she built on the intellectual foundation of her youth and adolescence.