NEWS gatherers have to pursue the news as well as turn up in the expected places to record it. Sometimes the pursuit involves distant perils; sometimes it involves the tedious work of extracting a few good pictures or a happy quote or two from a mountain of less promising material. Two stories in this week's TIME illustrate these two kinds of news pursuit.

The distant peril was in Angola, that sleeping Portuguese colony that thought itself most immune to Africa's winds of change. Correspondents Robert Morse and James Burke were among the reporters who decided to stay around Angola after the high-seas adventure of the Santa Maria story ended. They were thus on hand to report Angola's worst racial flare-ups, in which nearly 40 were killed (see FOREIGN NEWS). Some of the perils of reporting Angola last week: one reporter critically injured; four expelled, and the films made by all cameramen (including Burke) mysteriously tampered with in Lisbon, en route to the U.S.

The less dramatic, selective kind of news gathering is exemplified in this week's eight-page spread on the Civil War. Millions of words are being written these days and many ambitious projects are under way to re-create the cataclysmic events of a century ago. TIME chose instead to observe the occasion with drawings made at the time. A showing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington provided the opportunity. Associate Editor Cranston Jones picked 50 examples from the show, from which TIME'S final choices were made, and Press Editor John Koffend, working from a supermarket cart full of old books and magazines, gathered the story of those early precursors of picture journalism, the 30 hardy Special Artists of the Civil War.

THIS week Artist Russell Hoban, 36, joins the ranks of fourscore artists who have painted TIME covers. Though he also paints industrial subjects, Hoban is best known for his sports pictures, such as this week's of Oscar Robertson. Watching "the Big O" shoot 13 baskets in Syracuse, Hoban concluded: "He makes it look easy--nothing heroic." But in his paintings, says Hoban, "I try to go for a heroic quality. You could take the basketball out of Robertson's hand and put a sword in and he's in a classic stance for a soldier. What makes sport interesting to watch is that the athletes are proxies for us and celebrate the qualities of cunning and endurance that we should have in our lives."

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