Foreign Correspondent

After filing 400 stories from China, reporter Melissa Chan never thought she'd wind up in the headlines herself. Chan returned to Southern California last week as the first accredited foreign correspondent to be expelled from China in 14 years, an act that sparked a flurry of news reports and expressions of solidarity from fellow journalists. Chan, who was the sole Al Jazeera English correspondent in China, said she knew she was on shaky ground for most of this year. She had been working on month-by-month credentials since January, when the government refused a routine visa-renewal request.

Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick has received the Shorenstein Journalism Award for her "innovative and extraordinarily sensitive reporting on Northeast Asia over the past decade. " The award, given by Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, was established in 2002 to recognize journalism that helps Americans understand the complexities of Asia. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize. Demick, a Times correspondent since 2001 and chief of the paper's Beijing bureau since 2008, has reported on human trafficking, corruption and persecution of ethnic minorities in China and on famine and repression in North Korea.

Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick has received the Shorenstein Journalism Award for her "innovative and extraordinarily sensitive reporting on Northeast Asia over the past decade. " The award, given by Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, was established in 2002 to recognize journalism that helps Americans understand the complexities of Asia. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize. Demick, a Times correspondent since 2001 and chief of the paper's Beijing bureau since 2008, has reported on human trafficking, corruption and persecution of ethnic minorities in China and on famine and repression in North Korea.

KABUL, Afghanistan - After years of comings and goings, almost everything about leaving Kabul is familiar: the ride through dusty dawn streets, skirting past old men on bicycles and boys in horse-drawn carts, the long airport trudge through four luggage screenings and pat-downs, the way the plane's wingtips seem to almost scrape the jagged peaks surrounding the city. Everything is the same - but the knowledge that this is the last time. Kabul has been home for more than three years, but on this trip my assignment as a foreign correspondent here is ending, and I will join the American exodus from its long war in Afghanistan.

Although Nick B. Williams Jr. would carve out a distinguished career as an editor and foreign correspondent at the Los Angeles Times, he first had to overcome the "junior" at the end of his name. He joined the newspaper in the late 1960s when his father, Nick B. Williams Sr., was editor of The Times, and a highly regarded one at that. "When Nick junior was added to the staff, a number of people - cynics mainly - said, 'He's the editor's son. What the hell is he going to do?' Turns out, if they had waited 20 minutes, they would have found out he was a terrific editor and a terrific reporter," George Cotliar, a former managing editor of The Times, said Wednesday.

Reporting from New York -- Anthony Shadid, a journalist who gave voice to those muffled by the turmoil around them — from Iraqi families enveloped in civil war to young Libyans spurred to take up arms against a dictator — died while doing just that: reporting from Syria in defiance of official attempts to limit media coverage of the bloodshed there. Shadid, who died Thursday at 43, was stricken by an apparent asthma attack while preparing to leave Syria with his New York Times colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks.

Jack Belden, 79, an author and foreign correspondent who covered China both before and after World War II and Africa and Europe during the war. He worked for United Press in the 1930s and then for Time and Life magazines in Burma and North Africa before returning to China to cover the rise to power of Mao Zedong. He wrote three books, "Retreat With Stillwell" (1943), "Still Time to Die" (1944) and "China Shakes the World" (1949). In Paris on Sunday of lung cancer.

Marquis W. Childs, foreign correspondent, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, has died at age 87. Childs, former Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had been in failing health in recent months. A spokesman for the newspaper said he died Saturday at Children's Hospital of San Francisco after lapsing into a coma at his retirement home there.

Don Schanche, a retired Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who was one of the most widely traveled and highly regarded journalists of his time, died Thursday of cancer at his home in Key Biscayne, Fla. He was 68. Schanche came to The Times in 1976 from a distinguished career as a magazine editor and writer.

Tom Lambert, veteran foreign correspondent who was described by a frustrated Nikita Khruschev as "the garbage collector" for his ability to find and publish suppressed facts despite censorship in the former Soviet Union, has died. He was 83. Lambert, who wrote for The Times for 13 years, died Sunday in his home in Fairfax, Va., of cancer, his daughter, Mikel Lambert Rowe, said Tuesday.

Thank goodness the Daily Caller has got some game for exposing conflicts of interest and really important stuff that other news sites are missing. The website known for saying that it has unearthed scandals said Wednesday it had unearthed the shocking news that the moderator of Thursday's vice presidential debate once had someone named Barry Obama as a guest at the first of her three weddings. Now most of us in the political press have become far too complacent to backtrack even one wedding into the past of the debate moderators.

Marc Duvoisin, a veteran editor who has overseen multiple award-winning projects at The Los Angeles Times, was named managing editor of the newspaper Thursday. Duvoisin fills a position left vacant since December, when Davan Maharaj was promoted to editor. "In his 10-plus years at Spring Street, Marc has had a guiding hand in some of the finest journalism we've published. He's shown an ability to bring together diverse newsroom disciplines to make our most ambitious work shine," Maharaj said.

Although Nick B. Williams Jr. would carve out a distinguished career as an editor and foreign correspondent at the Los Angeles Times, he first had to overcome the "junior" at the end of his name. He joined the newspaper in the late 1960s when his father, Nick B. Williams Sr., was editor of The Times, and a highly regarded one at that. "When Nick junior was added to the staff, a number of people - cynics mainly - said, 'He's the editor's son. What the hell is he going to do?' Turns out, if they had waited 20 minutes, they would have found out he was a terrific editor and a terrific reporter," George Cotliar, a former managing editor of The Times, said Wednesday.

After filing 400 stories from China, reporter Melissa Chan never thought she'd wind up in the headlines herself. Chan returned to Southern California last week as the first accredited foreign correspondent to be expelled from China in 14 years, an act that sparked a flurry of news reports and expressions of solidarity from fellow journalists. Chan, who was the sole Al Jazeera English correspondent in China, said she knew she was on shaky ground for most of this year. She had been working on month-by-month credentials since January, when the government refused a routine visa-renewal request.

Marie Colvin and I covered our first combat together in 1986, after the U.S. bombed Libya. She was 30, pretty, ambitious and talented. She soon had Col. Moammar Kadafi and his aides in her thrall and parlayed her many scoops for United Press International into a job as a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. I last saw her a year ago, in Cairo during the revolution. Three decades of bearing witness to war showed in her face: I recognized her only from her black eye patch, which she had worn since a hand grenade destroyed her left eye in Sri Lanka in 2001.

Reporting from New York -- Anthony Shadid, a journalist who gave voice to those muffled by the turmoil around them — from Iraqi families enveloped in civil war to young Libyans spurred to take up arms against a dictator — died while doing just that: reporting from Syria in defiance of official attempts to limit media coverage of the bloodshed there. Shadid, who died Thursday at 43, was stricken by an apparent asthma attack while preparing to leave Syria with his New York Times colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks.

George Corey, 90, foreign correspondent and screenwriter. An adventurer, Corey sailed to China in the 1920s to teach dentistry. When the Communist revolution occurred, he began covering it for the New York Times. He continued as a correspondent in Brazil and other countries. During Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Corey traveled throughout Europe, providing information to the U.S. government.

Louis B. Fleming, who was one of The Times' first foreign correspondents and established bureaus for the newspaper at the United Nations and in Rome, died Sunday at his Pasadena home after a brief illness, said a daughter, Leni Fleming. He was 85. He joined The Times as a general assignment reporter in 1960 and two years later opened the U.N. bureau as the newspaper was expanding "coverage and news research at all levels," according to a 1962 Times article. In 1968, Fleming moved to Rome to restart a bureau that had been dormant for years and ran it until 1971.

The first reunion of foreign correspondents who covered the 1970-75 Cambodian civil war — and perhaps the last, given the advanced ages of many — ended Friday, 40 years after the conflict began. "A bunch of ‘ Jurassic Park' journos," one reporter said. "'Hurt Locker' meets ‘Animal House,'" another said. The self-deprecating humor belied a period that was deceptively deadly for journalists. Although the Cambodia war received far less attention than its counterpart in neighboring Vietnam, 36 correspondents working for foreign news operations were killed or reported missing during the conflict, compared with 33 in Vietnam, according to the Associated Press.