This week President Biden will sign legislation guaranteeing extended healthcare and disability benefits to military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Burn pits are common in war zones on temporary fire bases lacking sewage or secure trash collection. My first experience with them occurred in Vietnam when I encountered two Spec 4s grimly pulling tubs of — What is that?? — from beneath an elevated privy.
The day I almost died was a sunny Sunday 50 years ago this week. I was a 24-year-old Time Magazine correspondent in Saigon who along with photographers Dirck Halstead and LeMinh Thai decided to get an early start on the week by driving north up Highway 13 to meet a company of South Vietnamese marines. Their goal: March to the Cambodian border and lift the siege of An Loc, a tiny rubber town founded by the French that had been encircled by the Viet Cong for three months.
You’re familiar with Purdue and Princeton. You know about Penn State and Pitt. But are you aware of Poupon U? It’s a small culinary institute in Middleton, six miles outside Madison, WI. You won’t find it on U.S. News & World Report’s Best College Rankings but, rest assured, all its students can cut the mustard. At the center of Poupon U sits the Mustard Museum, a repository of more than 6,300 different mustards.
By David DeVoss Covid-19. Shuttered bars and restaurants. Urban lockdowns. Mask fatigue. Curfews. Canceled holiday gatherings. Want to get away? Well, why not? There’s never been a better time to travel. Like anything, there are risks and benefits to global travel during a pandemic. There are bargains everywhere you look. Want to fly from New…
By David DeVoss Politicians and public health officials tell us we’re all in this together and perhaps we were initially. But then they closed the bars. Next went theaters, churches and entertainment venues. Today, most restaurants are shuttered except for a table by the front door where customers retrieve take away orders. People still can…
Washington DC accuses China of deceptive trade practices, currency manipulation, industrial espionage and misleading the world on the origin and severity of the coronavirus. California doesn’t really care. It just wants Chinese shoppers to come back and start spending money.
By David DeVoss Los Angeles isn’t such a bad place to be when it comes to social distancing. April’s warm sunshine has replaced the rainy weeks of March. Grocery stores are open and relatively well stocked. There’s no sense of panic despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Rarely do you hear the wail of an ambulance.…
China usually is the most extravagant exhibitor at Los Angeles’ annual Travel and Adventure Trade Show. But this week almost all of China’s booths were eerily quiet, filled only by empty chairs. Officially, 60 million residents in Central China are quarantined in response to the rampaging coronavirus that already has taken 1,855 lives and sickened…
In the days before fake news and blogging – back when the term “fair and balanced” didn’t mean biased and skewed – professional journalists dedicated to the factual reporting of real news roamed the earth. One of the best was Anthony Marcus Paul, an American educated Australian who covered Asia from 1972 until his death last month at age 81.
Tony Paul was a gifted editor and war correspondent, whom I met in 1977 when both of us were based in Hong Kong. We covered Southeast Asia, myself for Time Magazine and Tony for the Reader’s Digest, which at that time was the world’s largest selling magazine with a circulation of 23 million.
California Declares War By David DeVoss To hear governor Jerry Brown tell it, California is all that stands between the United States and the ruin of the nation. In his recent “State of the State” address, Brown promised to defy Donald Trump, fashioning it as a great patriotic quest: “When we defend California,” Brown said,…