Not since the November 1965 power blackout has a single event affected so many people so personally and immediately as the subject of this week's cover story: the mail strike. This time the effects are even broader, involving 12 states as we go to press, and possibly the entire nation within days. The story details the grievances of the messengers whose traditional loyalty to their rounds has been shattered in a bitter dispute over wages. It also recounts the unfortunate--occasionally amusing--effects of the walkout. Our correspondents from all over the country filed voluminous reports to Senior Editor Laurence Barrett, Writer Peter Stoler and Researcher Marion Pikul. In New York City, where the trouble began, Researchers Madeleine Berry, Patricia Beckert and Georgia Harbison were detailed to sound out the mood and reaction of the citizenry. Other correspondents covered angry strikers' meetings, interviewed businessmen and bankers, Post Office, Government and union officials, letter carriers and clerks. Correspondent Rudolph Rauch had a special interest in the strike's early settlement. "I'm in the National Guard, and if it's not over soon I may be out on the streets delivering letters myself." -

Even in the best of times, communication of any sort tends to be a chancy matter in Southeast Asia. This week's story of the coup in Cambodia posed its full share of problems for TIME'S correspondents. By good fortune, we already had T.D. Allman, who is normally stationed in Laos, on the scene, but he was in Phnom-Penh, the Cambodian capital, in the wake of anti-Communist riots the week before. The problem was how to get his eyewitness report out of the country, since all communications were immediately cut. Allman solved that by giving his file to a messenger who somehow drove to Thailand. Later, Allman was able to telex and telephone his material--that is, when the gremlins were off the wires. In Saigon, Bureau Chief Marsh Clark, who coordinated the reports from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and South Viet Nam, reported that telex communications even between such major centers as Bangkok and Saigon were "so bad that for a time they looked like a drunken man's version of the Rosetta stone." Bangkok Bureau Chief David Greenway, who filed exhaustively on the political implications of the coup, reported the same trouble from his end, as did Correspondent Robert Anson, working on the story in Vientiane, Laos. At one point Anson noted that he had managed to set up a private minibureau for TIME in an abandoned airline office near his hotel. "It has a chair, a desk, a telephone and a rat, but we call it home."

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