A GOOD reporter's duty, ambition and pleasure is to be on the spot when the news happens. Sometimes he finds himself in a tighter spot than some of the participants in the events he is reporting, and this duty becomes less pleasurable. In the past fortnight, two TIMEmen, Africa Correspondent Lee Griggs and Guatemala Stringer Robert Rosenhouse, found themselves too close to the news for comfort.

Griggs was on the job as Congolese troops hovered outside the U.N.-guarded embassy-residence of Ghanaian Charge d'Affaires Nathaniel Welbeck, trying to get at the charge and make him fly out of the country. Watching the scene, Griggs and two other reporters were grabbed by a Congolese plainclothesman befuddled by bangi (raw marijuana). They were under arrest, he said, as Communist spies. Griggs was ordered to squat on a lawn directly across the street from the Ghanaian embassy. Five feet away a pair of Congolese soldiers lay prone, their rifles cocked and aimed at Griggs's head, with orders to shoot if firing broke out across the street. After an hour, word of Griggs's predicament reached the head of the Congo army, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who sent an emissary in time to rescue Griggs--but not in time to save Griggs's car, which disappeared down the street with the plainclothesman at the wheel (at week's end, it was still missing). An hour later, firing did break out between the Congolese and the charge's U.N. protectors.

In Guatemala, Correspondent Rosenhouse toured the front, where troops rebelling against President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes were battling the regular army. He found no sign of direct Castro support to the rebels as Ydigoras claimed. When he tried to dispatch his story, Ydigoras' police tossed Rosenhouse into solitary for five hours in a windowless adobe cell. After the U.S. consul pleaded Rosenhouse's case, Ydigoras finally hauled the correspondent onto the carpet for a bit of bland but pointed advice: follow the government line--or else. The advice came a little late. Even as Ydigoras was delivering his lecture, a duplicate of Rosenhouse's dispatch was on its way to TIME--courtesy of a passing traveler.

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IN the Jan. 2 issue of TIME, the editors will once again announce the Man of the Year. He will be the person who in their judgment, has done the most to change the world--for good or evil--during 1960. TIME'S men of the past four years have thus ranged from the Hungarian Freedom Fighter (1956) to Nikita Khrushchev (1957), Charles de Gaulle (1958) and Dwight Eisenhower (1959). It is an old TIME reader's custom to match wits with the editors around this time of year. Readers who would like to enter this year's sweepstakes are invited to think back over the year's newsmakers and make their own choice for Man of the Year. Those whose candidate turns out to be the same as the editors' will get a certificate of membership in the ancient and honorable Order of Contemporary Historians. Competitors should send their choice, plus name and address to: TIME Man of the Year Sweepstakes, Box 1960, New York 46, N.Y.

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