The patient, his hands melted away by leprosy, laughed: "no, don't take my picture," he said. "I’ll break the camera." Is his ancient joke tragic or funny? As you walk through the corridors of the nation's only leprosarium, you get no answer, only more questions - hazy, disturbing questions about a hospital filled with conflict. You are not even sure if the government - at a cost of $1,600,000 a year - should operate such a hospital. Most of the 300 patients seem to feel there is no need. They feel social fright, not medical sense, has placed them in forced isolation, sometimes for years, sometimes for life. Their battle is not against a germ but against a public attitude that pictures leprosy as terrifying and unclean. They feel more leprosy sufferers would seek earlier treatment if it did not mean forced segregation...

The balding, stocky white man pointed a finger excitedly. "You newsmen are missing the real story," he said. "The negroes don't want integration any more than we white folks do. Why don't you talk to them. Pick out any group. You'll find out what I know." The Associated Press followed the suggestion of the man in the angry crowd at Central High, the school kept segregated by Gov. Orval Faubus and the National Guard. But the results did not show what the segregationist said he knew. Nineteen negroes were interviewed, some in their homes, some at their jobs. They were rich and poor, with elegant furniture and threadbare rugs. Some spoke with college accents, others mumbled. A few were grandmothers, two were old maids. One man shoveled dirt for a plumber, another headed a large school...

Despite all its strange names and obscure terrain, surprise thrusts and counter-thrusts, wild claims and counter-claims, the Nigerian civil war is simple to follow and understand, for only one battlefield matters, the heartland of the Ibo people. Now that heartland has been penetrated. The federal military government says it has captured Enugu, the coal town of 60,000 that is the capital of Biafra, the name the Eastern Region took when it seceded last May 30, bitter because thousands of lbos, its dominant tribe, had been massacred in Northern Nigeria last year. If the claim about Enugu is true, Biafra may have received a staggering blow. Capitals usually have more than symbolic value in Africa. Since towns are small and communications bad, capitals usually are the center of all modern life. In general, they have the only good airport, the only control for letting telephone calls go from one city to another, the only radio transmitter, the only buildings big enough to house a government...